THE  MEN 

the 

NINETIES 

BERNARD  «& 
TV/T  TT  n  n  T  M  A  N 


1- 


THE  MEN  OF  THE  NINETIES 


THE 
MEN    OF   THE    NINETIES 

BY 

BERNARD  MUDDIMAN 


G.  P.   PUTNAM'S   SONS 

NEW   YORK 

1921 


All  rights  reserved 


PROLOGUE 

THE  day  Beardsley  left  his  stool  and  ledger 
in  a  London  insurance  office  and  betook 
himself  seriously  to  the  illustration  of  that 
strange  comic  world  of  Congreve,  a  new  mani- 
festation of  English  art  blossomed.  It  had, 
no  doubt,  been  a  long  time  germinating  in  the 
minds  of  many  men,  and  there  had  been 
numerous  signs  pointing  the  way  on  which  the 
artistic  tendencies  of  the  nineties  would  travel. 
For  example,  just  about  the  same  time  as 
Beardsley's  eighteenth  year,  a  coterie  of  young 
men,  fresh  from  the  Varsity  in  many  cases, 
made  their  appearance  in  London  openly  pro- 
claiming the  doctrine  of  art  for  art's  sake  under 
the  aegis  of  Oscar  Wilde.  So  in  the  last  age  of 
hansom  cabs  and  dying  Victorian  etiquette, 
these  young  men  determined  that  the  rather 
dull  art  and  literary  world  of  London  should 
flower  like  another  Paris. 

If,  for  the  sake  of  making  a  beginning,  one 
1  B 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

must  fix  on  that  memorable  day  when  Beardsley 
burnt  his  boats  as  the  date  of  the  opening  of 
the  period  of  the  nineties,  it  must  be  remem- 
bered that  this  arbitrary  limitation  of  the 
movement  is  rather  a  convenience  than  a  neces- 
sity. To  divide  up  anything  so  continuous  as 
literature  and  art  into  sections  like  a  bookcase 
is  uncommonly  like  damming  up  a  portion  of  a 
stream  to  look  at  the  fish  in  it.  It  breaks  the 
contact  between  what  was  before  and  what 
came  after.  However,  as  one  must  go  a  long 
way  back  to  investigate  accurately  how  a  new 
movement  in  art  arises,  and  as  it  is  tedious  to 
follow  up  all  the  clues  that  lead  to  the  source, 
it  will  be  perhaps  as  well  not  to  worry  too 
much  over  the  causes  of  the  movement  or  over 
the  influences  from  which  it  arose.  Let  us 
accept  the  fact  so  well  pointed  out  by  Mr. 
W.  G.  Blaikie  Murdoch  in  The  Renaissance 
of  the  Nineties,  that  the  output  of  the  nineties 
was  '  a  distinct  secession  from  the  art  of  the 
previous  age  .  .  .  ,  in  fact  the  eighties,  if  they 
have  a  distinct  character,  were  a  time  of  transi- 
tion, a  period  of  simmering  for  revolt  rather 
than  of  actual  outbreak  ;  and  it  was  in  the 
succeeding  ten  years  that,  thanks  to  certain 
young  men,  an  upheaval  was  really  made.1 
It  is  to  France  if  anywhere  we  can  trace  the 


THE   MEN   OF  THE   NINETIES 

causes  of  this  new  attitude.  First  of  all,  in 
painting,  the  great  French  impressionists,  with 
Manet  and  Monet  leading  them ;  the  doctrine 
of  plein  air  painting,  and  all  the  wonder  of 
this  new  school  of  painting  gave  a  new  thrill  to 
art.  Then  about  1885  the  literary  symbolists 
killed  the  Parnassian  school  of  poetry,  while  at 
the  same  time  there  was  a  new  esplozlone 
naturlisiica.  Paris,  always  the  city  of  light, 
was  again  fluting  new  melodies  for  the  world. 
In  the  Rue  de  Rome,  Stephane  Mallarme  re- 
ceived all  the  world  of  art  and  letters.  To  the 
Rue  de  Rome  came  Whistler,  John  Payne, 
George  Moore,  Oscar  Wilde,  and  others.  The 
French  influence  that  swept  over  to  England 
was  as  powerful  as  that  which  stirred  artistic 
Germany,  creating  a  German  period  of  the 
nineties  in  the  group  of  symbolists  who,  under 
Stefan  George,  issued  the  now  famous  Blatter 
fur  die  Kunst.  The  Englishmen,  indeed,  who 
attended  these  soirees  of  the  Rue  de  Rome  did 
not  come  away  empty-handed.  Not  only  did 
their  own  work  suffer  an  artistic  change 
through  this  influence,  but  they  handed  it  on 
to  their  successors.  So  directly  and  indirectly 
the  great  French  painters  and  writers  of  the 
day  influenced  the  art  of  England,  creating  the 
opportunity  for  a  distinct  secession  from  the 
3 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

art  of  the  previous  age.  At  the  same  time 
French  art  and  literature  were  never  stationary 
but  always  developing.  It  was  only  in  1890 
that  we  find  the  real  Regnier  appearing.  In 
the  same  year  Paul  Fort,  just  eighteen  summers 
like  Beardsley,  founded  the  Theatre  d'Art.  All 
this  French  art  at  high  pressure  had  a  stimu- 
lating effect  on  English  art ;  and,  in  fact,  re- 
mained its  main  stimulus  until  the  Boer  War, 
when  the  imperialism  of  writers  like  Kipling 
became  the  chief  interest.  So  it  was  in  no 
small  degree  the  literary  symbolists,  the  plein 
air  painters  and  all  the  motives  that  lay  behind 
them,  that  awoke  the  Englishmen  of  the 
nineties  to  new  possibilities  in  art  and  life.  In 
Paris,  in  1890,  Rothenstein  met  Conder,  and  at 
once  the  two  became  lifelong  friends.  There 
they  encountered  artists  like  Toulouse  Lautrec 
and  Anquetin. 

The  first  men,  of  course,  to  realise  this  feverish 
activity  in  France  were  the  elder  men,  who 
handed  on  the  tidings  to  the  younger  ma- 
jority. Thus  the  men  of  the  eighties  turned 
the  attention  of  the  unknown  of  the 
nineties  towards  France,  so  that  Englishmen 
again  began  to  remember  that  something  else 
counted  in  Paris  besides  lingerie.  In  dealing 
then  with  the  influences  that  helped  to  beget 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

the  period,  it  is  as  well  to  remember  that  if 
Walter  Pater  and  Whistler  were  its  forerunners, 
so  to  speak,  Oscar  Wilde  and  George  Moore 
were  responsible  in  no  small  degree  for  many 
of  the  tendencies  that  afterwards  became 
prevalent. 

Wilde  himself,  in  fact,  was  artistically  an 
influence  for  evil  on  his  weaker  juniors.  His 
social  success,  his  keen  persiflage,  his  indolent 
pose  of  greatness,  blinded  them  as  much  as  it 
did  the  of  TroXXoi  to  his  real  artistic  industry 
and  merit.  His  worst  works  were,  in  fact, 
with  one  exception,  his  disciples.  Richard 
Le  Gallienne  in  his  Quest  of  the  Golden 
Girl  and  Prose  Fancies  was  watered-down 
Wilde,  and  very  thin  at  that.  Even  John 
Davidson,  in  Baptist  Lake  and  Earl  Lavender, 
strove  in  vain  to  overtake  the  masterly  ease 
with  which  Wilde's  ordered  prose  periods  ad- 
vance like  cohorts  of  centurions  to  the  sound 
of  a  full  orchestra.  Wilde's  best  work — his 
Prose  Poems,  his  poem  The  Harlot's  House,  his 
one-acter  Salome,  and  one  or  two  of  the  stories 
in  the  House  of  Pomegranates — will,  however, 
remain  as  some  of  the  finest  flowers  of  the  age's 
art.  Yet  Wilde,  in  reality,  was  senior  to  the 
nineties  proper,  and  was  much  too  good  an 
artist  to  approve  of  much  of  the  work  that  was 
5 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

done  in  imitation  of  himself  during  the  period 
by  the  mere  hangers-on  of  the  nineties.  He 
was  with  the  men  of  the  nineties,  but  not  of 
them.  Beardsley,  indeed,  the  age's  real  king, 
took  the  liberty  of  mocking  at  Wilde  in  the 
very  illustrations,  or  rather  decorations,  in- 
tended for  Wilde's  most  elaborate  production. 
Wilde,  in  his  turn,  never  wrote  for  The  Yellow 
Book,  which  he  disliked  intensely.  Again,  we 
know  what  Symons's  opinion  of  Wilde  was  from 
his  essay  on  him  as  a  poseur.  In  fact,  Wilde 
was  a  writer  apart  from  the  others,  though 
undoubtedly  his  presence  among  them  up  to 
the  time  of  his  debacle  was  a  profound  direct 
influence. 

On  the  other  hand,  George  Moore,  as  a  reac- 
tionary influence  against  Victorianism.1  as  a 
senior  who  had  lived  and  written  in  Paris,  was 
more  of  an  indirect  factor  for  the  younger  men. 
For  a  time  he  lived  in  the  Temple,  where  many 
of  them  had  come  to  live.  By  his  works  he 
helped  to  disseminate  the  influences  of  the  great 
French  writers  and  painters  that  had  come  into 
his  own  life.  His  own  writings  came  to  others 
surcharged  with  'The  poisonous  honey  of 
France."1  In  his  Modern  Painting,  in  his  novel, 
Evelyn  Innes,  in  his  era  of  servitude  to 

1  See  his  Literature  at  Nurse,  1885. 

6 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

Flaubert's  majesty,  he  is  of  the  nineties.  But 
the  nineties  with  George  Moore  were  merely  a 
phase  out  of  which  he  grew,  as  out  of  many 
others.  But  when  the  nineties  began  Moore 
contrived  to  assist  at  their  birth  in  the  same 
way  as  he  did  later  at  that  of  the  Celtic  renais- 
sance. Indeed,  it  is  said,  in  Moore's  novel, 
Mike  Fletcher  (1889),  one  can  obtain  a  glimpse 
of  the  manner  in  which  the  period  was  to 
burgeon. 

There  was.  indeed,  amongst  the  younger  men 
in  those  early  days  a  wonderful  spirit  of  cama- 
raderie. It  was  an  attractive  period  full  of  the 
glamour  of  youth  before  it  went  down  fighting 
for  Art  with  a  capital  A,  before  age  had  chilled 
its  blood  or  dulled  its  vision.  And  there  came, 
no  doubt,  an  immense  vitality  for  them  all,  a 
stimulating  energy  to  each  one,  from  this 
meeting  together  in  London.  Indeed,  coming 
together  by  chance,  as  it  were,  in  London,  they 
not  only  discovered  one  another  and  the  inef- 
fable boon  of  comradeship,  but  they  also  redis- 
covered, through  Whistler,  London  for  art.  So 
once  again  the  streets  of  London  began  to  be 
written  about,  not  it  is  true  in  the  Dickens 
manner,  but  still  with  even  as  great  a  love  as 
his.  They  went  so  far  as  to  attempt  to  insti- 
tute real  French  cafe  life,  by  having  meetings 
7 


at  the  Cheshire  Cheese  and  evenings  in  the 
Domino  Room  of  the  Cafe  Royal.  Symons 
wrote  of  the  ballets  of  Leicester  Square ; 
Dowson  of  the  purlieus  round  the  docks ; 
Davidson  made  poems  of  Fleet  Street ;  Binyon 
sang  of  white  St.  Martin's  and  the  golden 
gallery  of  St.  Paul's ;  Crackanthorpe  sketched 
his  London  vignettes ;  Street  talks  of  the  in- 
definable romance  of  Mayfair.  In  fact  the 
nineties  brought  the  Muses  back  to  town.  In 
a  cabman's  shelter,  in  Soho  restaurants  of 
doubtful  cheapness,  in  each  other's  rooms,  they 
rejoiced  in  each  other's  company.  At  the  same 
time  Beardsley,  by  a  stroke  of  luck  through 
the  good  services  of  friends,  was  commissioned 
by  Mr.  Dent  to  illustrate  Le  Morte  cT  Arthur. 
The  Bodley  Press  had  begun  in  Vigo  Street  in 
1887.  Symons,  Yeats,  and  others  had  already 
published  their  first  books.  The  curtain  had 
gone  up  on  the  drama  of  the  nineties,  of  which 
this  is  intended  as  a  brief  appreciation. 

At  the  date  of  the  appearance  of  these  young 
men  amid  a  mass  of  lucubrators,  there  was 
actually  a  band  of  genuine  young  writers 
(besides  the  big  Victorians  like  Meredith  and 
Hardy),  who  were  turning  out  good  work,  and 
who  were  under  the  sway  of  that  old  Pan  of 
poetry,  Henley  of  The  National  Observer.  These 
8 


THE   MEN   OF  THE   NINETIES 

young  men  of  Henley  must  not  be  therefore 
confused  with  the  Yellow  Book  group.  They 
were  often  deliberately  coarse,  not  because  they 
liked  it,  but  because  it  was  part  of  their  artistic 
gospel.  And  when  one  considers  the  methods 
of  the  feeblest  of  them,  one  sees  more  ruffianly 
sturdy  British  horseplay  than  art,  more  braying 
and  snarling  than  sounding  on  the  lute.  But 
among  the  best  of  them,  Stevenson,  Kipling, 
and  Steevens,  was  a  fine  loyalty  to  the  traditions 
of  the  leading  spirit  of  the  Observer  Henley — 
Pan  playing  on  his  reed  with  his  crippled  hoofs 
hiding  amid  the  water-lilies  of  the  purling 
stream.  All  these  last  writers  and  artists  were 
men  of  the  Anglo-Saxon  tradition  ;  while,  on 
the  other  hand,  the  young  men  who  had,  so  to 
speak,  just  come  to  town,  were  full  of  the  Latin 
tradition.  The  main  thing  in  the  lives  of  these 
last  was  French  literature  and  art,  and  out  of 
this  influence  came  not  only  the  art,  but  the 
eccentricities,  of  the  coterie,  which  is  so  often 
called  the  nineties.  Theirs  was  a  new  spirit. 
They  were  of  the  order  of  the  delectable  '  Les 
Jeunes."1  Epigram  opened  a  new  career  with 
Oscar  Wilde ;  Beardsley  dreamed  of  a  strange 
world ;  Ernest  Dowson  used  to  drink  hashish 
and  make  love  in  Soho  in  the  French  manner 
of  Henri  Murger's  Latin  Quarter — for  a  time, 
9 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

indeed,  hair  was  worn  long,  and  the  ties  of  the 
petty  homunculi  of  the  Wilde  crowd  were  of 
lace ;  but,  fortunately,  artists  like  Beardsley 
and  the  other  men  worth  while  did  not  culti- 
vate foolishness  except  as  a  protection  against 
the  bourgeois. 

But  enough  of  these  affectations ;  the  point 
I  wish  to  bring  out  here  is  that  the  men  who 
drew  and  wrote  for  The  Savoy  wrote  their  art 
with  a  difference  to  that  of  those  others  who  were 
their  contemporaries  but  appeared  in  the  first 
instance  as  a  virile  imperialistic  movement  in 
The  Scots  Observer  and  The  National  Observer. 
The  artists  of  the  nineties  were  more,  as  we 
say  rather  badly  in  English,  of  the  '  kid-glove 
school.'  A  note  of  refinement,  a  distinction 
of  utterance,  an  obsession  in  Art  marked  all 
their  best  as  well  as  their  worst  work.  But 
this  by  no  means  prevented  the  two  schools 
having  a  very  salutary  influence  on  each  other. 
Indeed,  we  find  a  man  like  Mr.  W.  B.  Yeats, 
who  really  belonged  to  a  third  movement,  his 
own  Celtic  renaissance,  publishing  first  of  all 
lyrics  like  '  The  Lake  Isle  of  Innisfree '  under 
the  banner  of  Henley,  and  attending  a  year  or 
two  later  the  Rhymers'  Club  meetings  before 
he  found  his  own  demesne.  But  to  his  former 
comrades  of  the  Cheshire  Cheese,  the  men 
10 


THE  MEN   OF  THE  NINETIES 

who  concern  us  here,  Yeats  has  found  occasion 
to  render  befitting  praise  in  the  well-known 
lines : 

You  had  to  face  your  ends  when  young — 
'Twas  wine  or  women,  or  some  curse — 

But  never  made  a  poorer  song 

That  you  might  have  a  heavier  purse ; 

Nor  gave  loud  service  to  a  cause 
That  you  might  have  a  troop  of  friends  : 

You  kept  the  Muses'  sterner  laws 
And  unrepenting  faced  your  ends. 

In  fact,  since  influences  and  counter-influences 
in  all  ages  of  literature  are  such  subtle  vermin 
to  ferret  out,  I  propose  to  avoid  as  far  as  pos- 
sible any  generalities  in  that  connection,  and  to 
interpret  broadly  and  briefly  a  somewhat  vague 
period  that  reviewers  have  acquired  the  habit 
of  calling  '  the  nineties.'  What  then  was  this 
period  ?  It  was  a  portion  of  the  last  decade  of 
the  last  century  which  began  about  1890,  and 
passing  through  the  Rhymers'  Club,  blossomed 
out  into  The  Yellow  Book  and  The  Savoy  perio- 
dicals, and  produced  works  like  Beardsley's 
drawings,  Gender's  fans,  Dowson's  poetry,  and 
Hubert  Crackanthorpe's  short  stories.  The 
men  who  composed  the  group  are  too  numerous 
to  recall  in  their  entirety,  even  if  a  satisfactory 
list  of  such  a  nature  could  be  produced.  So  all 
11 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

I  intend  to  attempt  here  is  a  summary  of  the 
activities  of  certain  typical  examples  of  the 
group  as  will  serve  to  furnish  an  appreciation 
of  their  general  work.  And  the  way  I  propose 
to  obtain  this  view  is  to  begin  by  considering 
Beardsley  as  the  central  figure  of  the  period ; 
to  deal  next  with  the  two  most  vital  manifestoes 
of  the  movement  and  their  respective  literary 
editors,  The  Yellow  Book  and  Henry  Harland, 
The  Savoy  and  Mr.  Arthur  Symons,  passing 
on  in  turn  to  the  writers  of  fiction,  the  poets, 
the  essayists  and  dramatists  not  of  the  whole 
decade,  but  only  to  those  with  whom  this  par- 
ticular movement  is  concerned  ;  it  will  then  be 
time  to  make  a  few  deductions  on  the  spirit  of 
the  whole  of  this  tendency.  By  rigidly  adhering 
to  only  those  men  who  were  actually  of  the 
nineties  group  I  am  only  too  conscious  these 
pages  will  be  considered  often  to  be  lacking  in 
the  great  literary  events  and  figures  of  the  age, 
such  as  Hardy's  Jude  the  Obscure^  the  rise  of 
the  Kipling  star,  the  tragedy  of  Wilde,  the 
coming  of  Conrad,  etc.  etc.  Yet  the  sole 
object  of  this  scant  summary  would  be  defeated 
if  I  began  to  prattle  of  these  and  others  like 
Bernard  Shaw.  In  fact  its  raison  d'etre  con- 
strains a  method  of  treatment  which  must  not 
be  broken. 

12 


I 

TO  begin  with  Aubrey  Beardsley  has  many 
advantages,  for  it  brings  us  at  once 
not  only  to  the  type  of  mentality  most  repre- 
sentative of  the  period,  but  also  to  the  man 
whose  creative  power  was  probably  the  greatest 
factor  of  the  period,  to  the  boy  who  changed, 
as  has  been  said,  the  black  and  white  art 
of  the  world,  and  to  the  artist,  from  whose 
work  we  can  most  easily  deduce  the  leading 
contemporary  characteristics.  The  art  of  these 
men  was  in  a  way  abnormal,  while  the  men 
themselves  who  produced  it  were  exotics ;  and 
Beardsley's  is  not  only  the  most  abnormal  art 
of  them  all,  but  also  he  himself  is  the  greatest 
exotic.  As  Robert  Ross  well  said  as  a  mere 
comment  on  the  decade,  he  is  invaluable  : 
*  He  sums  up  .all  the  delightful  manias,  all 
that  is  best  in  modern  appreciation — Greek 
vases,  Italian  primitives,  the  "  Hypneroto- 
machia,"  Chinese  porcelain,  Japanese  kake- 
monos, Renaissance  friezes,  old  French  and 
English  furniture,  rare  enamels,  mediaeval 
13 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

illumination,  the  debonnaire  masters  of  the 
eighteenth  century,  the  English  pre-Raphael- 
ites.1  In  Beardsley,  so  to  speak,  was  inset  all 
the  influences  that  went  to  make  the  period 
what  it  was.  And  another  reason  why  it 
is  so  convenient  to  begin  with  him  is  that 
he  and  not  Oscar  Wilde  was  in  reality  the 
great  creative  genius  of  the  age.  Besides  his 
black-and-white  work  all  the  world  knows,  in 
which,  as  Father  Gray  says,  '  His  imaginative 
gifts  never  showed  a  sign  of  fatigue  or  ex- 
haustion,1 l  Beardsley  practised  in  other  arts. 
While  a  youngster  at  Brighton  he  promised 
to  become  a  musical  prodigy,  and  in  later  days 
Symons  describes  him  at  a  Wagner  concert  grip- 
ping the  seat  with  nervous  intensity.  He  wrote 
some  charming  poetry,  and  as  picturesque  a 
fairy  tale  for  grown-ups  as  has  ever  been 
written  in  Under  the  Hitt.  In  an  interview 
he  states,  probably  slyly,  he  was  at  work  in 
1895  on  a  modern  novel2 ;  while  in  1897  he 
said,  '  Cazotte  has  inspired  me  to  make  some 
small  contes.  I  have  one  in  hand  now  called 
The  Celestial  Lover."1  He  began  once  to  write 
a  play  with  the  actor,  Brandon  Thomas.  In 

1  Last  Letters  of  Aubrey  Beardsley,  with  an  Introduc- 
tion by  the  Rev.  John  Gray,  1904. 

2  The  Sketch,  April  10,  1895. 

14 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

his  late  illustrations  for  Gautier's  Mademoiselle 
de  Maupin  he  was  clearly  working  towards 
water-colour  work,  while  at  one  time  he  began 
under  Walter  Sickert  his  only  oil  painting  (un- 
finished), '  Women  regarding  a  dead  mouse.1 
By  no  means  least,  he  became  a  leader  in 
English  poster  work.  All  of  this  was  essen- 
tially creative  work.  And  when  death  came  he 
was  very  far  from  his  artistic  or  intellectual 
maturity.  So  is  it  not  just  to  say  that  this 
young  man  who  practised  nearly  all  the  forms 
of  art,  and  who  was  also  an  avid  reader  and 
student,  remains  the  chief  creative  figure  of  the 
nineties  ? 

Indeed,  there  is  no  more  pleasing  personality 
in  the  whole  period  than  this  '  apostle  of  the 
grotesque,1  as  his  own  decade  loved  to  hail 
him.  Born  at  Brighton  in  1872  he  was  edu- 
cated at  the  local  Grammar  School,  whose 
magazine,  Past  and  Present,  contains  his 
earliest  work.  The  Kate  Greenaway  picture 
books,  it  is  said,  started  him  drawing.  At 
school  he  was .  neither  keen  on  his  work  or 
games,  but  used  to  be  continually  doing 
*  little  rough,  humorous  sketches.1  Reading 
was  his  great  refuge,  and  when  he  fell  in  with 
some  volumes  of  the  Restoration  dramatists  he 
had  already  begun  to  find  his  feet  in  that  world 
15 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

of  the  mad  lusts  of  Wycherley  and  the  per- 
fumed artificiality  of  Congreve.  Of  school  life 
itself  he  speaks  bitterly  and  with  no  regret. 
At  sixteen  he  must  have  been  particularly  glad 
to  escape  from  it  and  enter,  first  of  all,  an 
architect's  office  in  London,  and  then,  the  next 
year,  the  Guardian  Life  and  Fire  Assurance 
Office,  where  his  fatal  illness  unfortunately 
first  began  to  reveal  its  presence.  Then  came 
his  seed-time  up  till  1891,  when  he  did 
little  but  amateur  theatricals.  But  at  length 
Beardsley  discovered  himself.  Many  gentle- 
men have  subsequently  stated  that  they  dis- 
covered him.  It  may  be  that  they  discovered 
him  for  themselves,  but  it  was  Beardsley  and 
Beardsley  alone  who  found  himself.  He  cer- 
tainly received,  however,  a  large  amount  of 
appreciative  sympathy  when  he  started  to 
draw  a  series  of  illustrations  in  his  spare 
time  for  Congreve's  Way  of  the  World, 
and  Marlowe's  Tamburlaine.  He  was  without 
art  training  in  the  usual  sense,  though  he  went 
of  nights  in  1892  to  Professor  Brown's  night 
school  at  Westminster,  but  still  kept  to  the 
Insurance  Office  stool  till  August,  when,  after 
being  recognised  by  Burne-Jones  and  Watts 
with  kindness,  he  left  his  post  to  live  by  his 
art.  What  had  probably  actually  permitted 
16 


THE  MEN   OF  THE  NINETIES 

him  to  take  this  step  was  the  commission 
given  by  J.  M.  Dent  to  illustrate  Le  Morte 
d"1  Arthur.  Any  way  he  was  launched  out  by 
the  first  number  of  The  Studio  with  Joseph 
PennelPs  article  on  '  A  New  Illustrator,1  and, 
what  was  more  important,  with  eleven  of 
Beardsley's  own  works.  At  that  time  all  his 
art  was  intuitive  without  much  knowledge 
of  modern  black  and  white.  Indeed  he  was 
artistically  swamped  at  the  moment  with  the 
glory  of  the  pre-Raphaelites  and  Burne-Jones. 
The  Le  Morte  d"1  Arthur,  really,  was  intended 
as  a  kind  of  rival  to  the  Kelmscott  Press  pub- 
lications, and  Beardsley  in  his  border  designs 
had  small  difficulty  in  excelling  Morris's  work. 
Next  year,  1893,  finds  these  influences  modi- 
fied to  a  certain  extent,  although  the  Salom6 
drawings  still  belong  to  that  cadaverous,  lean 
and  hungry  world  of  Burne-Jones,  from  which 
Beardsley  has  not  completely  as  yet  rescued 
himself  by  means  of  Frenchmen  like  Con- 
stantin  Guys  ;  but  his  release  has  well  arrived 
in  1894  with  his  design  4  The  Fat  Woman,' 
a  caricature  of  Mrs.  Whistler.  Watteau, 
Rops,  and  the  Japanese,  and  the  thousand 
books  he  is  now  reading  throw  open  at  last  all 
the  splendour  of  the  art  world  to  him.  He 
lacks  nothing,  and  he  goes  forward  borrowing 
17  c 


THE   MEN  OF  THE    NINETIES 

lavishly,  like  Shakespeare,  from  any  source 
that  suits  him.  Beardsley's  illustrations  are 
generally  critical  decorations,  although  it  must 
never  be  forgotten  he  did  attempt  on  more 
than  one  occasion  a  series  of  illustration  pure 
and  simple  in,  for  example,  his  early  scenes  for 
Manon  Lescaut,  La  Dame  aiuc  Camelifut,  and 
Madame  Bovary,  which  are  not  altogether  suc- 
cessful. He  is  perhaps  at  his  bej-t  as  the 
illustrating  critic,  which  he  is  somewhat  scorn- 
fully in  Satom^,  very  happily  in  Pope's  The 
Rape  of  the  Lock,  and  triumphantly  in  Aristo- 
phanes1 Lysistrata.  It  can  be  said  of  his  work, 
rather  sweepingly  no  doubt,  but  still  truth- 
fully, he  began  by  decorating  books  with  his 
Le  Morte  d"1  Arthur  ,•  he  then  tried  illustrating 
them  ;  but  wound  up  in  criticising  them  by  his 
decorations.  '  Have  you  noticed,1  he  once 
wrote  to  Father  Gray,  '  have  you  noticed  that 
no  book  ever  gets  well  illustrated  once  it  be- 
comes a  classic  ?  Contemporary  illustrations 
are  the  only  ones  of  any  value  or  interest.1 
But  Beardsley  was  always  more  than  a  mere 
illustrator,  for  where  a  learned  Editor  writes 
notes  and  annotations  on  Aristophanes,  he 
decorates  him  ;  where  Arthur  Symons  would 
write  an  essay  on  Mademoiselle  de  Maupin, 
Beardslev  does  a  number  of  critical  designs. 
18 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

It  was,  in  fact,  an  age  of  the  critical  function  ; 
but  Beardsley's  criticism  is  of  that  supreme 
kind  Oscar  Wilde  called  '  creative  criticism.' 

At  one  time  it  was  customary  for  critics  to 
plead  that  he  was  only  a  supreme  imitator  of 
the  Japanese  or  somebody ;  but,  in  reality,  as 
has  been  pointed  out  by  Robert  Ross  in  his 
admirable  essays  on  his  work,  he  was  as  in- 
tensely original  as  an  illusti'ator  as  Sandro 
Botticelli  was  in  his  designs  for  Dante's  Divine 
Comedy,  or  William  Blake  for  the  drama  of 
Job.  None  of  them  interpreted  authors  for 
dull  people  who  could  not  understand  what  they 
read.  Perhaps  the  very  best  way  to  appreciate 
his  work  of  this  kind  is  often  to  take  it  away 
from  the  text,  and  say  this  is  the  way  Beardslev 
saw  The  Rape  of  the  Lock.  As  for  all  the 
supposed  influences  he  is  pretended  to  have 
laboured  under,  it  can  be  at  once  said,  he  was 
too  restless  a  personality  to  accept  merely  one 
influence  at  a  time.  If  he  took  from  anywhere, 
he  took  from  everywhere,  and  the  result  is  a 
great  and  original  draughtsman,  the  music  of 
whose  line  has  been  the  theme  of  many  artists. 
With  little  stippled  lines  in  the  background, 
and  masses  of  black  in  the  foreground,  the 
Wagnerites  burgeon  forth.  Black  and  white 
in  some  of  his  drawings  even  tell  us  the  colour 
19 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

of  some  of  the  silks  his  women  wear,  and  his 
white  is  the  plain  white  of  the  paper,  not  the 
Chinese  subterfuge.  A  few  rhythmic  pen- 
strokes  on  the  virgin  sheet  and  strangely  vital 
people  live.  The  hand  of  Salome  may  be  out 
of  drawing,  the  anatomy  of  Lysistrata  wrong ; 
but,  all  the  same,  they  live  with  a  rich  malevo- 
lent life.  One  has  to  go  back  to  the  Greek 
vase-painters  to  find  such  a  vivid  life  realised 
with  such  simple  effects.  This  simplicity  and 
austerity  of  lines,  these  few  dots  for  the  telling 
eyelashes,  these  blank  spaces  of  untouched 
paper  almost  insult  one  with  the  perfect  ease 
with  which  everything  is  accomplished.  But, 
as  a  matter  of  fact,  how  different,  how  difficult 
was  the  actual  creation  of  these  designs ! 
What  infinite  pains,  what  knowledge  went  to 
their  composition  !  '  He  sketched  everything 
in  pencil,  at  first  covering  the  paper  with 
apparent  scrawls,  constantly  rubbed  out  and 
blocked  in  again,  until  the  whole  surface  be- 
came raddled  from  pencil,  indiarubber,  and 
knife  ;  over  this  incoherent  surface  he  worked 

n  Chinese  ink  with  a  gold  pen,  often  ignoring 
the  pencil  lines,  afterwards  carefully  removed. 
So  every  drawing  was  invented,  built  up,  and 
completed  on  the  same  sheet  of  paper.1 1  '  But 

1  Aubrey  Beardsley,  by  Robert  Ross,  pp.  38-39.     1909. 
20 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

Beardsley's  subtlety  does  not  lie  only  in  his 
technique,  but  also  in  what  he  expresses 
thereby.  Looking  at  his  drawings,  one  always 
feels  in  the  presence  of  something  alive,  some- 
thing containing  deep  human  interest ;  and 
the  reason  is  that,  while  Beardsley  seldom 
aimed  at  realistic  rendering  of  the  human 
form,  he  was  a  superb  realist  in  another 
respect,  this  being  that  his  workmanship 
always  proved  itself  adequate  for  the  ex- 
pression of  the  most  subtle  emotions,  and  for 
the  embodiment  of  the  artist's  unique  per- 
sonality." l 

This  charming  personality  stood  him  in 
good  stead  when  the  Beardsley  craze  burst  upon 
London.  He  had  literally  set  the  Thames  on 
fire.  It  was  in  1894,  when  he  became  art 
editor  of  The  Yellow  Book  (which  I  discuss  on 
another  page),  that  the  craze  began  in  earnest. 
His  poster  for  Dr.  John  Todhunter's  The 
Comedy  of  Sighs,  at  the  Avenue  Theatre,  a 
three-quarter-length  figure  of  a  woman  in 
deep  blue,  standing  behind  a  gauze  curtain 
powdered  with  light  green  spots,  electrified  the 
dull  hoardings  of  London.  Another  poster, 
the  female  figure  in  a  salmon-pink  dress 

1  The  Renaissance  of  the  Nineties,  by  W.  G.  Blaikie 
Murdoch,  p.  29.     1911. 

21 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

standing  opposite  a  second-hand  bookshop, 
with  its  scheme  of  black,  green,  orange,  and 
salmon  pink,  advertising  Fisher  Unwinds  Pseu- 
donym Library,  flashed  its  colours  gaily  amid 
a  mass  of  stupid  commercial  advertising. 
Punch  parodied  'The  Blessed  Damozel'  with 
a  new  version  of  lauds  for  'The  Beardsley 
Girl.'  A  famous  tea-shop  exploited  the  type 
of  female  beauty. 

Oscar  Wilde^s  play  Salome  was  illustrated  by 
the  newly  arrived  young  artist.  The  columns 
of  the  papers  and  magazines  spread  his  fame, 
or  more  often  belittled  it.  The  new  art 
magazine,  The  Studio,  not  only  raised  him  to 
the  skies,  but  had  its  first  cover  done  by  him. 
And  all  this  happened  to  a  boy  who  had  only 
been  gone  from  school  six  years,  and  whose 
total  age  when  he  became  the  art  craze  of 
London  was  only  twenty-two.  But  he  was  not 
to  stop  there.  After  four  more  years  of 
crowded,  feverish  work  he  was  to  die,  after 
having  affected  all  the  black  and  white  art 
of  the  world.  He  was  to  be  at  once  accepted 
in  Paris.  He  was  to  raise  a  shoal  of  imitators, 
and  to  influence  more  or  less  detrimentally 
dozens  of  good  artists. 

Yet  all  this  phenomenal  success  was  not  to 
change  his  charming  personality  in  the  least. 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

He  still  remained  Aubrey  Beardsley,  the  boy 
doomed  to  death,  but  still  with  the  lovable 
heart  of  a  boy  who  wanted  to  enjoy  life. 

Max  Beerbohm  has  given  us  a  wonderful  per- 
sonal record  of  his  friend,  in  which  he  says  :  *  For 
him,  as  for  the  schoolboy  whose  holidays  are 
near  their  close,  every  hour — every  minute, 
even — had  its  value.  His  drawings,  his  com- 
positions in  prose  and  in  verse,  his  reading — 
these  things  were  not  enough  to  satisfy  his 
strenuous  demands  on  life.  He  was  an  accom- 
plished musician,  he  was  a  great  frequenter  of 
concerts,  and  seldom  when  he  was  in  London 
did  he  miss  a  "  Wagner  night "  at  Covent 
Garden.  He  loved  dining-out,  and,  in  fact, 
gaiety  of  any  kind.  .  .  .  He  was  always  most 
content  where  there  was  the  greatest  noise  and 
bustle,  the  largest  number  of  people,  and  the 
most  brilliant  light."1  In  the  Domino  Room 
of  the  Cafe  Royal  in  London ;  outside  the 
Brighton  Pavilion,  whose  architecture  haunted 
him  all  his  life.  Beardsley  was  at  .home  and 
happy.  '  I  am  really  happy,1  he  writes,  '  in 
Paris."1  And.it  was  Beardsley's  chief  pre- 
occupation to  communicate  in  his  drawings  the 
surprise  and  delight  which  this  visible  world 
afforded  him — a  world  of  strange  demi-mon- 
daines  and  eupeptic  stockbrokers,  of  odd  social 
23 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

parasites  and  gullible  idiots.  He  always  had 
an  engaging  smile  that  was  delightful  for 
friends  and  strangers  ;  while  he  was  big 
enough,  Robert  Ross  chronicles,  to  make 
friends  and  remain  friends  with  many  for 
whom  his  art  was  totally  unintelligible. 

After  he  vacated  The  Yellow  Book  art 
editorship,  and  The  Savoy  had  been  issued, 
Leonard  Smithers  became  the  real  Beardsley 
publisher.  There  were  no  dead-locks  with 
him  as  to  nude  Amors,  for  Smithers  had  a 
courage  of  his  own — a  courage  great  enough 
to  issue  The  Ballad  of  Reading  Gaol  when 
Wilde  was  under  his  cloud,  and  no  other  pub- 
lisher would  look  at  it.  It  was  Smithers  who 
issued  The  Savoy,  the  two  books  of  Fifty 
Drawings,  The  Rape  of  the  Lock,  The  Pierrot 
of  the.  Minute,  the  designs  for  Mademoiselle  de 
Maupin,  and  among  others  the  eight  '  Lysis- 
trata '  and  the  four  '  Juvenal '  drawings.  For 
any  one  to  study  all  this  variety  and  rapid 
growth  to  an  astounding  maturity  of  concep- 
tion and  execution  no  better  volumes  can  be 
recommended  than  A  Book  of  Fifty  Drawings 
(1897),  and  A  Second  Book  of  Fifty  Drawings 
(1899).  The  former  book  is  much  the  better  of 
the  two,  for  the  latter  is  a  book  of  scraps  to 
ti  large  extent.  Indeed,  in  the  first  book  all 
24 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

the  drawings  were  fortunately  selected  by  both 
Beardsley  himself  and  Smithers.  The  artist 
allowed  no  drawing  to  appear  in  it  with  which 
he  was  at  all  dissatisfied.  It  includes  his 
favourite,  '  The  Ascension  of  St.  Rose  of 
Lima1;  but  one  cannot  help  thinking  that 
there  have  crept  into  it  far  too  many  of 
his  immature  Le  Morte  d"1  Arthur  series.  For 
when  this  volume  was  issued  he  had  com- 
pletely discarded  that  painful  method  of 
design.  Indeed,  the  Salomt  decorations  (1894) 
had  bridged  this  brief  spell  of  his  puerility 
to  the  rich  fulfilment  of  The  Rape  of  the  Lock 
(1896).  Whistler  at  once  saw  this  difference, 
for,  it  is  on  record,  when  Beardsley  first  showed 
these  last  designs  to  him  he  '  looked  at  them 
first  indifferently,  then  with  interest,  then  with 
delight.  And  then  he  said  slowly,  "  Aubrey,  I 
have  made  a  very  great  mistake,  you  are  a  very 
great  artist."  And  the  boy  burst  out  crying. 
All  Whistler  could  say,  when  he  could  say 
anything,  was,  "  I  mean  it — I  mean  it." 1 

In  reality  one  can  of  course  now  see  signs  of 
the  real  artist  even  in  the  Le  Morte  $  Arthur 
series.  For  example,  the  true  Beardsley  type 
of  woman  appears  in  the  design  entitled  '  How 
Queen  Guenever  made  her  a  Nun.1  These 
Beardsley  women,  Wilde  hinted,  were  first 
25 


THE   MEN   OF  THE   NINETIES 

invented  by  the  artist  and  then  copied  by 
nature.  They  have,  indeed,  been  the  cause 
of  much  fine  writing,  one  androgynist 
describing  them  as  the  fruit  of  a  French 
bagnio  and  a  Chinese  visitor.  As  Pierre  Caunie 
demanded  of  Felicien  Rops  we  are  moved  to 
ask  of  Beard  sley  : 

Quels  Eclairs  ont  nimbe*  tes  fillettes  palies  ? 
Quel  stupre  assez  pervers,  quel  amour  devast*? 
Met  des  reflets  d 'absinthe  en  lenrs  melancolies  ? 

They  belong  to  the  same  world  as  the  women 
of  Toulouse  Lautrec,  Rops,  Odelon  Redon,. 
Bayros,  and  Rassenfosse — the  type  known  as 
la  loupeuse  insatiable  et  cupide.  They  move  and 
have  their  being  in  French  erotica  and  novels 
like  La  Faustine. 

Beard  si  ey  had  now  (1896)  reached  his  best 
period  with  The  Rape  of  the  Lock  and  The 
Lysistratu  of  Aristophanes,  and  of  the  two  the 
palm  should  be  awarded  to  the  eight  designs  of 
the  latter  work.  No  one  has  yet  dared  to  .say 
that  these  are  probably  his  masterpieces  ;  but 
some  day,  when  the  kinship  between  Beardsley 
and  those  old  Greek  Masters  who  designed 
their  exquisite  vases  and  wine  cups  is  estab- 
lished, this  truism  may  also  come  to  light.  It 
is  unlikely,  however,  to  become  revealed  until 
26 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

Aristophanes  himself  is  fully  translated  in  the 
vulgar  tongue,  for  not  even  the  most  generous 
Editer  in  his  monumental  edition  has  essayed 
that  impertinence  to  Mrs.  Grundy.  The 
illustrations  or  rather  critical  decorations  of 
Beardsley  are  also  not  likely  to  become  gene- 
rally circulated  to  all  because  of  their  frank- 
ness. For  phallism  is  purely  pornographic  if 
it  has  nothing  to  do  with  your  subject.  But 
unfortunately  it  is  a  considerable  factor  in  the 
Lyfsi-strata^  as  every  scholar  knows.  Beardsley 
himself  in  his  letters  lays  considerable  emphasis 
on  the  fact  that  he  was  illustrating  Aristophanes 
and  not  Donnay's  French  version  of  the  same. 
And  never  was  he  more  cynical  or  more  incisive; 
never  did  he  use  fewer  lines  with  more  effect ; 
never  was  love  and  its  depravities  more  scath- 
ingly or  so  disdainfully  ridiculed.  In  all  there 
were  eight  drawings  issued  with  a  variant  of  the 
third,  though  I  have  reason  to  believe  there 
was  also  a  ninth,  and  even  this,  his  worst 
erotic  drawing,  has  nothing  to  do  with 
obscenity.  He  had  learned  too  much  from  the 
men  who  designed  the  old  Hellenic  pottery 
to  be  obscene.  He  was  frank  as  Chaucer  is 
frank,  not  vicious  as  Aretino  delighted  to  be, 
or  indecent  like  the  English  artists  Howlandson 
27 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

and  James  Gillray  were  in  some  of  their 
fantasies.  Virgil  dying  wanted  to  destroy  his 
^Eneids,  and  Beardsley  in  articulo  mortis  wrote 
t  to  destroy  all  copies  of  Lysistrata  and  bawdy 
drawings.1  Yet  he  has  nothing  to  fear  from 
the  genuine  issue  of  those  drawings  that 
remain,  or  from  the  numberless  pirated  copies 
that  have  since  exuded  mysteriously  into 
places  like  Charing  Cross  Road.  Even  Fuchs 
in  his  Erotische  Kunst  has  to  say  :  '  Beardsley 
is  specially  to  be  noticed  for  the  refinement  of 
his  conceptions,  his  ultra-modern  culture,  his 
taste,  his  sense  of  proportion,  his  maturity  of 
execution.  No  harsh  or  discordant  notes,  no 
violent  tones.  On  the  contrary,  a  wheedling 
finesse.  In  some  respects  he  is  the  "  maladive  " 
beauty  of  our  time  incarnate.'  Beardsley, 
indeed,  never  descended  to  the  horrors  of  an 
Alfred  Kubin  or  to  the  tone  of  certain  of 
Bayros's  designs.  He  was  neither  immoral  nor 
moral,  but  unmoral  like  Rassenfosse  or  any  one 
else  who  has  not  a  fixed  ethical  theory  to 
teach.  In  his  Juvenal  drawings  (1897),  his 
five  Lucian  sketches  (1894),  and  the  Lysistrata 
(1896)  he  went  straight  to  the  great  gifts  of 
classical  literature,  and  in  touching  classical 
things  he  took  on  the  ancient  outlook  via, 
28 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

I  believe,  those  wonderful  Greek  vase  designers1 
which  he,  so  assiduous  a  haunter  of  the  British 
Museum,  must  have  not  only  seen,  but  revelled 
in.  But  of  these  the  best  and  freest  are  the 
Lysistrata  conceptions  ;  and  to  enjoy  these  one 
needs  an  initiation  that  is  not  every  man's  to 
receive. 

We  are,  however,  more  interested  here  with 
the  literary  side  of  his  work,  which  divides 
itself  into  poetry  and  prose.  As  a  poet 
Beardsley  has  been  accused  of  over- cleverness. 
Whatever  that  criticism  means  I  do  not  know. 
Probably  it  implies  some  similar  reflection 
to  the  statement  that  a  dandy  is  over-dressed. 
I  cannot,  however,  discover  any  such  affecta- 
tion in,  for  example,  that  charming  poem, 
The  Three  Musicians^  which  recounts  how  the 
soprano  *  lightly  frocked,1  the  slim  boy  who 
dies  '  for  reclame  and  recall  at  Paris,1  and  the 
Polish  pianist,  pleased  with  their  thoughts^ 
their  breakfast,  and  the  summer  day,  wend  their 
way  '  along  the  path  that  skirts  the  wood ' : 

1  Ross  says  in  his  Aubrey  Beardsley,  p.  45,  one  of  the 
events  which  contributed  'to  give  Beardsley  a  fresh  im- 
petus and  stimulate  his  method  of  expression '  about 
the  Salom6  time  was  '  a  series  of  visits  to  the  collection 
of  Greek  vases  in  the  British  Museum  (prompted  by  an 
essay  of  Mr.  D.  S.  MacColl).' 

29 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

The  Polish  genius  lags  behind, 

And,  with  some  poppies  in  his  hand, 
Picks  out  the  strings  and  wood  and  wind 

Of  an  imaginary  band. 

Enchanted  that  for  once  his  men  obey  his  beat 
and  understand. 

The  charming  cantatrice  reclines 

And  rests  a  moment  where  she  sees 
Her  chateau's  roof  that  hotly  shines 

Amid  the  dusky  summer  trees, 
And  fans  herself,    half    shuts    her    eyes,    and 
smooths  the  frock  about  her  knees. 

The  gracious  boy  is  at  her  feet, 

And  weighs  his  courage  with  his  chance  ; 
His  fears  soon  melt  in  noonday  heat. 
The  tourist  gives  a  furious  glance, 
Red  as  his  guide-book,  moves  on,  and  offers  up  a 
prayer  for  France. 

In  The  Ballad  of  a  Barber,  again,  there  is 
nothing  but  a  trill  of  song  in  limpid  verse. 
How  Carrousel,  the  barber  of  Meridian  Street, 
who  could  '  curl  wit  into  the  dullest  face,1 
became  fou  of  the  thirteen-year-old  King's 
daughter,  so  that 

His  fingers  lost  their  cunning  quite, 
His  ivory  combs  obeyed  no  more; 

is  a  typical  ninety  jeu  d'esprit,  only  much 
better  done  than  the  average  one.  With  the 
fewest  words  Beardsley  can  sketch  a  scene  or 
character,  as  he  used  the  fewest  of  lines  in 
30 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

his  drawings.  This  is  even  better  exemplified 
in  his  prose.  Time  and  again  a  single 
sentence  of  Under  the  Hill  gives  us  a  complete 
picture : 

Sporion  was  a  tall,  depraved  young  man,  with  a 
slight  stoop,  a  troubled  walk,  an  oval,  impassible 
face,  with  its  olive  skin  drawn  lightly  over  the 
bone,  strong,  scarlet  lips,  long  Japanese  eyes,  and 
a  great  gilt  toupet. 

We  seem  to  gaze  with  the  Abbe  Fanfreluche  at 
the  prints  on  his  bedroom  wall : 

Within  the  delicate  curved  frames  lived  the 
corrupt  and  gracious  creatures  of  Dorat  and  his 
school,  slender  children  in  masque  and  domino, 
smiling  horribly,  exquisite  lechers  leaning  over 
the  shoulders  of  smooth,  doll-like  girls,  and  doing 
nothing  in  particular,  terrible  little  Pierrots 
posing  as  lady  lovers  and  pointing  at  something 
outside  the  picture,  and  unearthly  fops  and  huge, 
bird-like  women  mingling  in  some  rococo  room. 

One  rubs  one's  eyes.  Are  these  not  the  draw- 
ings Franz  von  Bayros  of  Vienna  realised  later  ? 
But  Beardsley's  output  of  both  prose  and  verse 
is  actually  so  limited  that  one  cannot  compare 
his  double  art  work  to  that  of  an  artist  like 
Rossetti.  When  all  is  said  and  done,  his  great 
literary  work  is  the  unfinished  '  fairy '  tale  of 
Under  the  Hill.  In  its  complete  form  it 
belongs  to  the  class  of  works  like  Casanova's 
31 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

Memoires,  the  Reigen  of  Schnitzler,  the  novels 
of  Restif  de  la  Bretonne,  and  some  of  the 
Tlunisand  and  One  Nights.  It  is  an  enchanting 
book  in  the  same  way  as  Mademoiselle  de 
Maupin  or  Le  Roi  Pausole  are  enchanting 
books.  In  its  rococo  style  it  surpasses  the  best 
rhythms  of  Wilde,  who  only  succeeds  in  cata- 
loguing long  lists  of  beautiful  things,  while 
Aubrey  Beardsley  suggests  more  than  he  says 
in  the  true  impressionist  way  of  all  the  writers 
of  the  nineties.  Indeed,  the  purple  patches  of 
Beardsley  are  as  rich  in  fine  phrases  as  any 
paragraphs  of  the  period — as  faisandee  as 
any  French  writer  has  written.  Elizabethan 
euphuists,  Restoration  conceit-makers,  later 
Latins  with  all  the  rich  byzantium  jlorce  of 
brains  like  Apuleius,  can  make  as  finely-sound- 
ing phrases,  but  I  doubt  whether  they  can 
pack  away  in  them  as  rich  a  pictorial  glamour 
as  many  of  the  writers  of  the  nineties,  and 
Beardsley  amongst  them,  achieved.  We  have 
Helen  in  '  a  flutter  of  frilled  things  '  at  '  taper- 
time  ""  before  her  mirror  displaying  her  neck 
and  shoulders  '  so  wonderfully  drawn,1  and  her 
*  little  malicious  breasts  .  .  .  full  of  the  irri- 
tation of  loveliness  that  can  never  be  entirely 
comprehended,  or  ever  enjoyed  to  the  utmost.' 
Whole  scenes  of  the  book  are  unrolled  before 
32 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

us  like  priceless  tapestries.     The  '  ombre  gate 
way  of  the  mysterious  hill '  stands  before  us  : 

The  place  where  he  stood  waved  drowsily  with 
strange  flowers,  heavy  with  perfume,  dripping 
with  odours.  Gloomy  and  nameless  weeds  not  to 
be  found  in  Mentzelius.  Huge  moths,  so  richly 
winged  they  must  have  banqueted  upon  tapestries 
and  royal  stuffs,  slept  on  the  pillars  that  flanked 
either  side  of  the  gateway,  and  the  eyes  of  all  the 
moths  remained  open  and  were  burning  and 
bursting  with  a  mesh  of  veins.  The  pillars  were 
fashioned  in  some  pale  stone,  and  rose  up  like 
hymns  in  the  praise  of  pleasure,  for  from 
cap  to  base  each  one  was  carved  with  loving 
sculptures  .  .  . 

To  read  The  Toilet  of  Helen,  with  its  faint 
echoes  perhaps  of  Max  BeerbohnVs  '  Toilet  of 
Sabina '  in  The  Perversion  of  Rouge,  is  to  be 
lured  on  by  the  sound  of  the  sentences  : 

Before  a  toilet-table  that  shone  like  the  altar  of 
Notre  Dame  des  Victoires,  Helen  was  seated  in  a 
little  dressing-gown  of  black  and  heliotrope.  The 
Coiffeur  Cosme  was  caring  for  her  scented 
chevelure,  and  with  tiny  silver  tongs,  warm  from 
the  caresses  of  the  flame,  made  delicious  intelli- 
gent curls  that  fell  as  lightly  as  a  breath  about  her 
forehead  and  over  her  eyebrows,  and  clustered 
like  tendrils  round  her  neck.  Her  three  favourite 
girls,  Pappelarde,  Blanchernains,  and  Loureyne, 
waited  immediately  upon  her  with  perfume  and 
powder  in  delicate  flagons  and  frail  cassolettes,  and 
33  D 


THE   MEN   OF  THE  NINETIES 

held  in  porcelain  jars  the  ravishing  paints  pre- 
pared by  Chateline  for  those  cheeks  and  lips 
which  had  grown  a  little  pale  with  anguish  of 
exile.  Her  three  favourite  boys,  Claud,  Clair,  and 
Sarrasins,  stood  amorously  about  with  salver,  fan, 
and  napkin.  Millamant  held  a  slight  tray  of 
slippers,  Minette  some  tender  gloves,  La  Popeli- 
niere — mistress  of  the  robes — was  ready  with  a 
frock  of  yellow  and  yellow.  La  Zambinella  bore 
the  jewels,  Florizel  some  flowers,  Amadour  a  box 
of  various  pins,  and  Vadius  a  box  of  sweets.  Her 
doves,  ever  in  attendance,  walked  about  the  room 
that  was  panelled  with  the  gallant  paintings 
of  Jean  Baptiste  Dorat,  and  some  dwarfs  and 
doubtful  creatures  sat  here  and  there  lolling  out 
their  tongues,  pinching  each  other,  and  behaving 
oddly  enough. 

There  you  have  a  Beardsley  drawing  trans- 
fused into  words.  The  same  is  true  of  his 
description  of  the  woods  of  Auffray.  The 
same  is  true  of  the  wonderful  supper  served  on 
the  terrace  to  Helen  and  her  guests  amid  the 
gardens.  To  find  such  another  supper  in 
literature  one  has  to  turn  to  some  French 
author,  or,  better  still,  to  the  'Cena  Trimal- 
chionis"1  of  Petronius  himself.  From  this  it 
will  be  seen  that  Beardsley ""s  literary  work,1 

1  In  The  Influence  of  Baudelaire  in  France  and  Eng- 
land, by  G.  Turquet-Milnes,  pp.  277-280  (1913),  there  is 
an  interesting  study  of  his  Baudelairism. 

34 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

like  his  black-and-white,  though  the  embodi- 
ment of  the  spirit  of  his  age,  is  also  of 
the  noble  order  of  the  highest  things  in  art. 
It  is  for  this  reason,  indeed,  that  I  have 
selected  Beardsley  as  the  centre-piece  of  this 
brief  sketch  of  a  movement  that  is  dead  and 
gone.  He  was  the  incarnation  of  the  spirit 
of  the  age ;  but,  when  the  fall  of  Wilde 
killed  the  age  and  the  Boer  War  buried  it, 
neither  of  these  things  disturbed  or  changed 
the  magic  spell  of  his  art.  His  age  may  die, 
but  he  remains.  Even  now  he  has  outlived  the 
fad  period,  while  many  of  the  books  that  were 
written  at  that  date  by  others  and  decorated 
by  him  are  only  valuable  to-day  because  of  his 
frontispiece  or  wrapper.  One  has  not  forgotten 
those  wrappers,  for  as  one  will  not  forget 
the  work  of  William  Blake,  one  will  not  forget 
that  of  Aubrey  Beardsley.  His  enthusiasts 
treasure  the  smallest  fragment. 


35 


II 


LIKE  all  artistic  and  literary  movements  this 
one  had,  in  the  shape  of  various  periodicals,  its 
manifestoes.  In  fact,  it  was  a  period  particu- 
larly rich  in  this  kind  of  fruit.  In  The  Hobby 
Horse  the  voices  of  the  new  spirit  were  mingled 
for  the  first  time  with  those  of  the  past.  There 
were,  among  other  magazines,  The  Rose  Leaf., 
The  Chameleon,  The  Spirit  Lamp,  The  Pageant, 
The  Evergreen,  The  Parade,  The  Quarto,  The 
Dome,  The  Chord,  while  among  the  popular 
papers  The  Idler,  To-Day,  and  Pick-me-Up 
produced  the  work  of  men  like  Edgar  Wilson 
and  S.  H.  Sime ;  and,  further,  The  Butterfly, 
The  Poster,  and  The  Studio  must  be  carefully 
studied  for  the  tendencies  of  the  time.  But 
the  two  principal  organs  of  the  movement 
were,  beyond  all  doubt,  The  Yellow  Book  and 
The  Savoy.  Round  them,  as  around  the 
shrines  of  old  beside  the  JSgean,  gather  the 
faithful  and  the  chosen.  In  the  other  publica- 
tions there  was  too  much  jostling  with  the 
profane,  but  here  '  Procul  profani."1  It  will  be 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

well,  therefore,  although  it  has  been  done  more 
or  less  before,  to  study  these  two  magazines  in 
some  detail,  and  also  their  literary  editors  who 
gathered  the  clan  together.  In  both  cases 
Beardsley  was  the  art  editor,  though  he  was 
'  fired,'  to  put  it  plainly,  from  The  Yellow  Book 
after  its  fourth  number.  His  influence,  there- 
fore, permeated  both.  In  fact,  he  made  them 
both  works  of  value  for  the  coming  generations, 
and  particularly  in  the  case  of  The  Savoy  he 
bore  the  burden  of  the  day  and  saved  the 
monthly  from  fatuity.  When  he  leaves  The 
Yellow  Booh  it  will  be  found  to  be  never  the 
same.  When  he  is  too  ill  to  be  active  in  The 
Savoy  it  becomes  very  small  beer.  So  inter- 
woven with  the  lives  and  values  of  these 
publications  is  the  genius  of  Beardsley  that  one 
cannot  speak  of  the  one  without  referring  to 
the  other.  Of  Beardsley  himself  I  have  already 
spoken,  so  I  propose  to  confine  myself  strictly 
to  the  art  editor,  while  dealing  first  with  The 
Yellow  Book  and  its  literary  editor,  Henry 
Harland,  and  then  with  The  Savoy  and  Mr. 
Arthur  Symons. 

The  publisher,   Mr.   John  Lane,  says1   this 
much-discussed  Yellow  Book  was  founded  one 

1  In  his  pamphlet,  Aubrey  Beardsley  and  The  Yellow 
Book,  p.  1.     1903. 

37 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

morning  during  half-an -hour's  chat  over  cigar- 
ettes, at  the  Hogarth  Club,  by  himself,  Beards- 
ley,  and  Henry  Harland.  While  he  states  that 
*  Mr.  Harland  had  the  faculty  of  getting  the 
best  from  his  contributors,'  the  publisher  goes 
on  to  add  :  '  Beardsley's  defect  as  art  editor 
was  youth.  He  would  not  take  himself 
seriously  ;  as  an  editor  and  draughtsman  he 
was  almost  a  practical  joker,  for  one  had,  so  to 
speak,  to  place  his  drawings  under  a  microscope 
and  look  at  them  upside  down.  This  tendency, 
on  the  eve  of  the  production  of  Volume  V., 
during  my  first  visit  to  the  United  States, 
rendered  it  necessary  to  omit  his  work  from 
that  volume.'  Looking  back  on  this,  all  that 
one  can  say  now  is  that  although  Beardsley 
may  have  been  trying,  after  all,  he  and  not  the 
publisher  was  The  Yellow  Book,  and  with  his 
departure  the  spirit  of  the  age  slowly  volatilised 
from  the  work  until  it  deteriorated  into  a  kind 
of  dull  keepsake  of  the  Bodley  Head.  There 
were  thirteen  numbers  in  all,  and  Beardsley 
actually  art-edited  the  first  four.  In  the 
charming  prospectus  for  the  fifth  volume  he  is 
still  described  as  art  editor,  and  four  Beardsleys 
were  to  have  appeared  in  it :  '  Frontispiece  to 
the  Chopin  Nocturnes,1  '  Atalanta,1  '  Black 
Coffee,"  and  the  portrait  of  Miss  Letty  Lind  in 
88 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

'An  Artist's  Model."1  However,  the  break 
came,  and  Beardsley  had  no  further  connection, 
unfortunately,  with  the  fifth  volume. 

The  first  number,  as  in  the  case  of  so  many 
similar  periodicals,  was  brilliant.  The  standard 
set  was  too  high,  indeed,  to  last,  and  to  the 
staid  English  literary  press  of  the  time  it  was 
something  of  a  seven  days1  wonder.  The  Times 
described  its  note  as  a  '  combination  of  English 
rowdyism  and  French  lubricity.1  The  West- 
minster Gazette  asked  for  a  '  short  Act  of 
Parliament  to  make  this  kind  of  thing  illegal.1 
Above  all,  the  whole  rabble  descends  howling 
on  the  art  editor.  It  is  Beardsley  that  annoys 
them,  proving  how  he  stands  out  at  once 
beyond  his  comrades.  Against  the  literary 
editor,  Henry  Harland,  nothing  is  said ;  but 
the  press  are  full  of  the  offences  of  one 
Beardsley. 

As  Mr.  J.  M.  Kennedy,  in  his  English  Litera- 
ture, 1880-1905,  has  devoted  an  admirable,  if 
somewhat  scornful,  chapter  to  the  contents  of 
The  Yellow  Book,  it  is  to  Henry  Harland,  who 
seems  to  have  merited  all  the  charming  things 
said  about  him,  that  I  would  now  direct 
attention. 

A  delicate  valetudinarian  always  in  search  of 
health,  he  was  born  at  Petrograd  in  March, 
39 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

1861.  He  commenced  life  in  the  surrogate  of 
New  York  State,  whither  his  parents  removed, 
writing  in  his  spare  time  in  the  eighties,  under 
the  nom-de-plume  of  Sidney  Luska,  sketches  of 
American  Jewish  life.  Like  Theodore  Peters, 
Whistler,  and  Henry  James,  he  could  not,  how- 
ever, resist  the  call  of  the  Old  World,  and  he 
was  at  journalistic  work  in  London  when  he 
was  made  editor  of  The  Yellow  Book.  Besides 
his  editorial  duties  he  was  a  regular  contributor, 
not  only  writing  the  series  of  notes  signed 
'The  Yellow  Dwarf,1  but  also  turning  out  a 
number  of  short  stories.  But  London  was  only 
to  be  a  haven  of  brief  sojourn  for  this  writer, 
whose  health  sent  him  south  to  Italy.  Perhaps 
his  best  work  in  the  nineties  was  his  short  story 
Mademoiselle  Miss,  while  later  in  Italy  he 
opened  up  a  new  vein  of  dainty  comedy  fiction 
in  almost  rose-leaf  prose  with  The  Cardinal's 
Snuff-Box  (1900),  whose  happy  delicacy  of 
thought  and  style  he  never  equalled  again,  but 
was  always  essaying  to  repeat  until  death 
carried  him  off  in  Italy.  Although,  therefore, 
sitting  in  the  editorial  chair  at  the  Bodley 
Head,  Harland  can  only  be  said  to  have  been  a 
bird  of  passage  in  the  nineties,  and  not  one  of 
its  pillars  like  Arthur  Symons  of  The  Savoy. 
This  later  publication  was  started  as  a  rival 
40 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

to  The  Yellow  Book  soon  after  Beardsley  gave 
up  the  art-editing  of  the  earlier  periodical. 
In  1895,  when  '  Symons  and  Dowson,  Beardsley 
and  Conder,  were  all  together  on  a  holiday  at 
Dieppe  ...  it  was  there,  in  a  cabaret  Mr. 
Sickert  has  repeatedly  painted,  that  The  Savoy 
was  originated.11  It  was  issued  by  Leonard 
Smithers,  the  most  extraordinary  publisher,  in 
some  respects,  of  the  nineties,  a  kind  of  modern 
Cellini,  who  produced  some  wonderfully  finely 
printed  books,  and  was  himself  just  as  much  a 
part  of  the  movement  as  any  of  its  numerous 
writers.  Indeed,  no  survey  of  the  period  can 
be  complete  without  a  brief  consideration  of 
this  man. 

But  to  return  to  The  Savoy,  it  can  be  aptly 
described  as  the  fine  flower  of  the  publications 
of  the  age.  It  is  true  The  Yelloiv  Book  out- 
lived it,  but  never  did  the  gospel  of  the  times 
flourish  so  exceedingly  as  in  its  pages.  Here 
we  see  that  violent  love  for  a  strangeness  of 
proportion  in  art  that  was  the  keynote  of  the 
age.  Here  the  abnormal,  the  bizarre,  found 
their  true  home,  and  poetry  is  the  pursuit  of 
the  unattainable  by  the  exotic.  It  will,  there- 
fore, not  perhaps  be  out  of  place  before  dealing 

1  W.  G.  Blaikie  Murdoch's  Renaistance  of  the  Nineties, 
p.  21.  1911. 

41 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

with  its  literary  editor,  Mr.  Arthur  Symons,  to 
discuss  the  eight  numbers  that  appeared. 
Number  one  (printed  by  H.  S.  Nichols)  ap- 
peared as  a  quarterly  in  boards  in  January, 
1896.  An  editorial  note  by  Arthur  Symons, 
which  originally  appeared  as  a  prospectus, 
hoped  that  The  Savoy  would  prove  'a  peri- 
odical of  an  exclusively  literary  and  artistic 
kind.  .  .  .  All  we  ask  from  our  contributors  is 
good  work,  and  good  work  is  all  we  offer  our 
readers.  .  .  .  We  have  not  invented  a  new 
point  of  view.  We  are  not  Realists,  or 
Romanticists,  or  Decadents.  For  us,  all  art  is 
good  which  is  good  art.1  The  contents  of  the 
number  included  a  typical  Shaw  article,  full, 
like  all  of  his  work,  of  the  obvious  in  the  terms 
of  the  scandalous  ;  some  short  stories  by  Wed- 
more,  Dowson,  Rudolf  Dircks,  Humphrey 
James,  and  Yeats.  The  other  articles  were 
hardly  very  original ;  but  the  contributions  of 
Beardsley  dwarf  everything  else.  He  towers 
out  above  all  else  with  his  illustrations,  his 
poem  The  Three  Musicians,  and  the  beginning 
of  his  romantic  story  Under  the  Hill. 

Number  two  (April,  1896,  printed  by  the 

Chiswick    Press)   had    another   editorial    note 

courageously  thanking  the  critics  of  the  Press 

for  their  reception  of  the  first  number,  which 

42 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

4  has  been  none  the  less  flattering  because  it  has 
been  for  the  most  part  unfavourable.1  The 
contents  included  poems  and  stories  by  Symons, 
Dovvson,  and  Yeats,  while  John  Gray  and 
Selwyn  Image  have  poems  and  Wedmore  a 
story.  Beardsley  continues  his  romance,  and 
lifts  the  number  out  of  the  rut  with  his  Wag- 
neresque  designs.  Max  Beerbohm  caricatures 
him,  and  Shannon  and  Rothenstein  are  repre- 
sented. Among  articles  there  is  a  series  on 
Verlaine  ;  and  Vincent  (TSullivan,  in  a  paper 
*  On  the  Kind  of  Fiction  called  Morbid,'  sounds 
a  note  of  the  group  with  his  conclusion  :  '  Let 
us  cling  by  all  means  to  our  George  Meredith, 
our  Henry  James  .  .  .  but  then  let  us  try,  if 
we  cannot  be  towards  others,  unlike  these,  if 
not  encouraging,  at  the  least  not  actively 
hostile  and  harassing;  when  they  go  out  in  the 
black  night  to  follow  their  own  sullen  will-o'- 
the-wisps.  '  He  is  also  to  be  thanked  for 
registering  the  too  little  known  name  of  the 
American,  Francis  Saltus. 

Number  three  (July,  1896)  appeared  in  paper 
covers,  and  The  Savoy  becomes  a  monthly 
instead  of  a  quarterly  from  now  on.  There  is 
a  promise,  unfulfilled,  of  the  serial  publication 
of  George  Moore's  new  novel,  Evelyn  Innes. 
Yeats  commences  three  articles  on  William 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

Blake  and  his  Illustrations  to  the  '  Divine 
Comedy  J  and  Hubert  Crackanthorpe  contributes 
one  of  his  best  short  stories.  Owing  to  illness 
Beardsley's  novel  stops  publication,  but  his 
Ballad  of  a  Barber  relieves  the  monotony  of 
some  dull  stuff  by  the  smaller  men.  The  re- 
productions of  Blake's  illustrations  are  made  to 
fill  the  art  gap  of  Beardsley,  who  has  only  two 
black-and-whites  in.  The  publication  of  his 
novel  in  book  form  is  promised  when  the  artist 
is  well  enough. 

Number  four  (August,  1896)  at  once  reveals 
the  effect  of  Beardsley 's  inactivity  through 
illness,  and  shows  that  Beardsley  is  The  Savoy, 
and  all  else  but  leather  and  prunella.  The 
number,  however,  is  saved  by  a  story  of  Dowson, 
The  Dying  of  Francis  Donne ,  and  on  the  art 
side  a  frontispiece  for  Balzac's  La  Fille  aux 
Yeux  d'Or,  by  Charles  Conder,  is  interesting. 

Number  five  (September,  1896)  is  for  some 
unaccountable  reason  the  hardest  number  to 
procure.  Besides  the  cover  and  title-page  it 
contains  only  one  Beardsley,  The  Wonum  in 
White,  but  the  cover  is  an  exceptionally  beau- 
tiful Beardsley,  the  two  figures  in  the  park 
holding  a  collogue  sentimental  seem  to  have 
stepped  out  of  the  pages  of  Verlaine's  poem. 
Theodore  Wratislaw  and  Ernest  Rhys  con- 
44 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

tribute  the  stories.  Dowson,  Yeats,  and  the 
Canadian,  Bliss  Carman,  contribute  the  best  of 
the  poetry. 

Number  six  (October,  1896),  has  a  very  poor 
art  side,  with  the  exception  of  Beardsley's 
familiar  The  Death  of  Pierrot.  The  literary 
contents  consists  chiefly  of  the  editor.  One 
notices  the  periodical  is  dying.  The  only 
unique  feature  is  a  story,  The  Idiots,  by 
Com*ad,  and  Dowson  is  still  faithful  with  a 
poem. 

Number  seven  (November,  1896)  announces 
in  a  leaflet  (dated  October)  the  death  of  The 
Savoy  in  the  next  number.  The  editorial  note 
states  that  the  periodical  'has,  in  the  main, 
conquered  the  prejudices  of  the  press  ...  it 
has  not  conquered  the  general  public,  and, 
without  the  florins  of  the  general  public,  no 
magazine  .  .  .  can  expect  to  pay  its  way.1  In 
this  number  Beardsley  returns  to  attempt  to 
salve  it  with  his  remarkable  translation  of 
Catullus  :  Carmen  CL,  and  illustration  thereto. 
Yeats  and  Dowson  contribute  poems  and 
Beardsley  his  Tristan  and  Isolde  drawing. 

Number  eight   (December,  1896)  completes 

the  issue.     The  whole  of  the  literary  contents 

is    by  the   Editor   and   the    art   contents    by 

Beardsley  himself:    in   all   fourteen  drawings. 

45 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

By  way  of  epilogue,  Symons  says  in  their  next 
venture,  which  is  to  appear  twice  a  year,  '  that 
they  are  going  to  make  no  attempt  to  be 
popular.1  Unfortunately  for  English  periodi- 
cals it  was  a  venture  never  essayed. 

That  The  Savoy  is  far  truer  to  the  period 
than  The  Yellow  Book  was  perhaps  in  no  small 
way  due  to  the  fact  that  Mr.  Arthur  Symons 
was  its  literary  editor.  For  he  at  any  rate  in 
his  strenuous  search  for  an  aesthetical  solution 
for  art  and  life,  in  his  assiduous  exploring  in 
the  Latin  literatures  for  richer  colours  and 
stranger  sensations — he,  at  any  rate,  has  not 
only  been  the  child  of  his  time,  but  in  some 
ways  the  father  of  it.  His  sincere  love  of  art 
is  beyond  all  question,  and  it  has  sent  him  into 
many  strange  byways.  He  has  praised  in  purple 
prose  the  bird-like  motions  and  flower-like 
colours  of  the  ballet ;  he  has  taken  us  with  him 
to  Spanish  music-halls  and  Sevillian  Churches ; 
he  has  garnered  up  carefully  in  English  the 
myths  of  the  symbolists  and  translated  for  us 
the  enigmas  of  Mallarme — Herodias,  the  blood 
and  roses  of  D^Annunzio^s  plays  and  the  throb- 
bing violins  of  Verlaine's  muse ;  he  has  taken 
us  to  continental  cities,  and  with  him  we  have 
heard  Pachmann  playing  and  seen  the  enchant- 
ments of  the  divine  Duse.  All  the  cults  of  the 
46 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

Seven  Arts  has  this  Admirable  Crichton  of 
J£stheticism  discussed.  He  has  worked  towards 
a  theory  of  aesthetics.  He  has  written  charm- 
ingly (if  somewhat  temperamentally)  of  his 
comrades  like  Beardsley,  Crackanthorpe  and 
Dowson.  He  was  a  leader  in  the  campaign  of 
the  early  nineties,  and  his  work  will  always  be 
the  guiding  hand  for  those  who  come  after  him 
and  who  wish  to  speak  of  this  movement.  As 
early  as  1893  he  was  writing  of  it  as  'The 
Decadent  Movement  in  Literature '  in  Harper's, 
when  he  speaks  of  the  most  representative  work 
of  the  period  :  '  After  a  fashion  it  is  no  doubt 
a  decadence  ;  it  has  all  the  qualities  that  mark 
the  end  of  great  periods,  the  qualities  that  we 
find  in  the  Greek,  the  Latin,  decadence  ;  an 
intense  self-consciousness,  a  restless  curiosity  in 
research,  an  over-subtilising  refinement  upon 
refinement,  a  spiritual  and  moral  perversity.' 
Perhaps,  in  a  way,  it  is  an  immense  pity  that 
Symons  will  become  the  universal  guide  to  the 
period,  for  it  must  be  conceded  that  he  has 
always  been  prone  to  find  perversity  in  any- 
thing, as  Sir  Thomas  Browne  was  haunted 
with  quincunxes.  But  of  the  subtilty  of  his 
judgments  and  of  the  charming  prose  in  which 
he  labours  to  express  them  there  can  be  no 
question.  Listen,  for  example,  when  he  speaks 
47 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

of  the  aim  of  decadence :  '  To  fix  the  last  fine 
shade,  the  quintessence  of  things ;  to  fix  it 
fleetingly ;  to  be  a  disembodied  voice,  and  yet 
the  voice  of  a  human  soul ;  that  is  the  ideal  of 
decadence.1  How  beautifully  it  is  said,  so  that 
one  almost  forgets  how  dangerous  it  is.  Very 
aptly  did  Blaikie  Murdoch  say  the  Mantle  of 
Pater  fell  on  him.  It  is  the  same  murmured 
litany  of  beautiful  prose.  Indeed  Arthur 
Symons  is  the  supreme  type  of  belles  lettrist, 
Just  as  in  the  early  nineties  he  prided  himself 
on  the  smell  of  patchouli  about  his  verse,  so  he 
alone  remains  to-day  with  the  old  familiar 
scent  about  his  writings  of  a  period  dead  and 
gone  which  exacts  rightfully  our  highest  respect. 
As  one  owes  him  a  debt  of  homage  for  his  fine 
faithfulness  to  art,  so  one  thinks  of  him,  as  he 
himself  has  written  of  Pater,  as  a  *  personality 
withdrawn  from  action,  which  it  despises  or 
dreads,  solitary  with  its  ideals,  in  the  circle  of 
its  "  exquisite  moments  "  in  the  Palace  of  Art, 
where  it  is  never  quite  at  rest.1  How  true  that 
last  phrase  is,  '  never  quite  at  rest,1  of  the 
author.  For  to  him  Art  is  an  escape — the 
supreme  escape  from  life. 

Arthur    Symons    began    with    a    study   on 
Browning  and   the  volume   Days  and  Nights 
when  the  eighties  were  still  feeling  their  way 
48 


THE   MEN  OF  THE  NINETIES 

towards  the  nineties.  It  was  in  Silhouettes 
(1892)  and  London  Nights  (1895)  that  he 
appeared  as  perhaps  the  most  outre  member  of 
the  new  movement.  His  perfection  of  technique 
in  endeavouring  to  catch  the  fleeting  im- 
pression by  limiting  it,  never  cataloguing  it, 
marks  the  difference  of  his  verse  and  that  of 
the  secession  from  much  of  the  school  of  the 
eighties1  definite  listing  of  facts.  Symons, 
indeed,  is  not  only  a  poet  impressionist,  but 
also  a  critic  impressionist  in  his  critical  works 
like  Studies  in  Two  Literatures,  The  Symbolist 
Movement  in  Literature,  and  so  on.  This 
impressionism,  whilst  it  makes  his  verse  so 
intangible  and  delicate,  also  endows  his 
appreciations  with  a  certain  all-pervading 
subtlety.  It  is  as  though  a  poet  had  begun  to 
see  with  the  Monet  vision  his  own  poems.  It 
is  as  though  a  man  comes  away  with  an  im- 
pression and  is  content  with  that  impression  on 
which  to  base  his  judgment.  It  is  New  Year's 
Eve:  the  poet  records  his  impression  of  the  night: 

We  heard  the  bells  of  midnight  burying  the  year. 
Then  the  night  poured  its  silent  waters  over  us. 
And  then  in  the  vague  darkness  faint  and 

tremulous, 

Time  paused  ;  then  the  night  filled  with  sound  ; 
morning  was  here. 

49  E 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

The  poet  is  at  the  Alhambra  or  Empire 
Ballet :  like  an  impressionist  picture  a  poem 
disengages  the  last  fine  shade  of  the  scene.  He 
wanders  at  twilight  in  autumn  through  the 
mist-enfolded  lanes : 

Night  creeps  across  the  darkening  vale  ; 

On  the  horizon  tree  by  tree 
Fades  into  shadowy  skies  as  pale, 

As  moonlight  on  a  shadowy  sea. 

The  vision  remains  like  an  etching.  The 
poet  is  on  the  seashore  at  sunset : 

The  sea  lies  quietest  beneath 

The  after-sunset  flush, 
That  leaves  upon  the  heaped  gray  clouds 

The  grape's  faint  purple  blush. 

It  lingers  like  a  water-colour  in  one's  memory. 
He  sees  a  girl  at  a  restaurant  and  his  poem  is 
at  once  an  impression  as  vivid  as  a  painter's 
work.  In  a  phrase  he  can  cage  a  mood,  in  a 
quatrain  a  scene.  Where  does  this  ability 
come  from  ?  The  answer  is,  perhaps,  given  by 
the  one  name  Verlaine,  whose  genius  Mr. 
Symons  has  done  so  much  to  hail. 

In  the  gay  days  of  the  early  nineties  before 
black  tragedy  had  clouded  the  heavens  there 
was  no  more  daring  secessionist  from  the  tedious 
old  ways  than  the  editor  of  The  Savoy.  To 
those  days,  like  Dowson's  lover  of  Cynara,  he 
50 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

has  '  been  faithful  in  his  fashion.1  If  the 
interest  is  now  not  so  vivid  in  his  work  it  is 
because  the  centre  of  art  has  shifted.  If  Mr. 
Symons  has  not  shifted  his  centre  too,  but 
remained  faithful  to  the  old  dead  Gods,  it  is 
no  crime.  It  only  means  that  we,  when  we 
wish  to  see  him  as  one  of  the  figures  of  his 
group,  must  shut  up  his  volumes  of  criticism, 
forget  his  views  on  Toulouse  Lautrec  and 
Gerard  Nerval,  and  William  Blake,  put  aside 
his  later  verses  and  his  widow's  cruse  of 
writer's  recollections,  and  turn  with  assurance 
to  the  debonnaire  poet  of  Silhouettes  and  London 
Nights. 

It  has  been  said  that  Mr.  Symons  stands  for 
'a  Pagan  revolt  against  Puritanism."  It  is 
argued,  because  he  was  nurtured  in  noncon- 
formity, art  came  to  him  with  something  of 
the  hysteria  a  revelation  comes  to  a  revivalist 
meeting.  This  may  be  true,  but  I  cannot  help 
thinking  that  no  writer  amid  all  these  French 
influences  which  he  had  so  eagerly  sought  out 
yet  remains  so  typical  of  the  English  spirit. 
It  may  be  heresy,  but  I  always  see  in  mind  the 
gaiety  of  a  Nice  carnival  in  a  certain  drawing 
with  one  solid,  solemn  face  surveying  the  scene 
over  a  starched  front.  Beneath  it  is  written  : 
'  Find  the  Englishman.1 
51 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

Like  the  American  critic,  James  Huneker, 
Mr.  Arthur  Symons  has  also  occasionally 
written  short  imaginative  prose  studies.  One 
thinks,  too,  in  this  respect  of  Walter  Pater's 
wonderful  Imaginary  Portraits  and  particularly 
his  glorious  study  of  Watteau,  and  I  rather 
think  that  this  success  must  have  moved  the 
spirit  of  the  two  later  critics  to  a  noble  rivalry. 
The  best,  indeed,  of  Mr.  Symons's  Spiritual 
Adventures  are  probably  those  studies  which 
are  mostly  attached  to  some  theme  of  art  which 
has  been  after  all  the  all-engrossing  motive  of 
this  delightful  critic's  life.  An  Autumn  City 
and  The  Death  of  Peter  Waydelin  :  the  first,  a 
sensitive's  great  love  for  Aries,  whither  he 
brings  his  unresponsive  bride  ;  the  other,  a 
study  quaintly  suggestive  of  a  certain  painter's 
life  :  both  of  these  sketches  are  unquestionably 
more  moving  than  Mr.  Symons's  studies  of  non- 
conformists quivering  at  the  thought  of  hell- 
fire.  To  them  one  might  add,  perhaps,  Esther 
Kahn,  the  history  of  the  psychological  develop- 
ment of  an  actress  after  the  style  of  La 
Faustine. 

Mr.  Symons's  favourite  word  is  '  escape ' ;  his 

favourite  phrase  '  escape  from  life.1      Now  the 

one  and  now  the  other  reappear  continually  in 

all  kinds  of  connections.      Of  John  Addington 

52 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

Symonds,  for  example,  he  writes  :  *  All  his  work 
was  in  part  an  escape,  an  escape  from  himself/ 
Of  Ernest  Dowson's  indulgence  in  the  squalid 
debaucheries  of  the  Brussels  kermesse  he 
writes :  '  It  was  his  own  way  of  escape  from 
life.1  Passages  of  like  tenor  abound  in  his 
writings ;  and,  in  one  of  his  papers  on  The 
Symbolist  Movement  in  Literature,  he  explains 
his  meaning  more  precisely  : 

Our  only  chance,  in  this  world,  of  a  complete 
happiness,  lies  in  the  measure  of  our  success  in 
shutting  the  eyes  of  the  mind,  and  deadening  its 
sense  of  hearing,  and  dulling  the  keenness  of  its 
apprehension  of  the  xmknown.  .  .  .  As  the  present 
passes  from  us,  hardly  to  be  enjoyed  except  as 
memory  or  as  hope,  and  only  with  an  at  best 
partial  recognition  of  the  xincertainty  or  inutility 
of  both,  it  is  with  a  kind  of  terror  that  we  wake 
up,  every  now  and  then,  to  the  whole  knowledge 
of  our  ignorance,  and  to  some  perception  of  where 
it  is  leading  us.  To  live  through  a  single  day  with 
that  overpowering  consciousness  of  our  real 
position,  which,  in  the  moments  in  which  alone  it 
mercifully  comes,  is  like  blinding  light  or  the 
thrust  of  a  flaming  sword,  would  drive  any  man 
out  of  his  senses. . .  .  And  so  there  is  a  great  silent 
conspiracy  between  us  to  forget  death ;  all  our 
lives  are  spent  in  busily  forgetting  death.  That 
is  why  we  are  so  active  about  so  many  things 
which  we  know  to  be  unimportant,  why  we  are 
so  afraid  of  solitude,  and  so  thankful  for  the 
53 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

company  of  our  fellow  creatures.  Allowing  our- 
selves for  the  most  part  to  be  vaguely  conscious  of 
that  great  suspense  in  which  we  live,  we  find  our 
escape  from  its  sterile,  annihilating  reality,  in 
many  dreams,  in  religion,  passion,  art ;  each  a 
forgetfulness,  each  a  symbol  of  creation. . .  .  Each 
is  a  kind  of  sublime  selfishness,  the  saint,  the 
lover,  and  the  artist  having  each  an  incommunic- 
able ecstasy  which  he  esteems  as  his  ultimate 
attainment ;  however,  in  his  lower  moments,  he 
may  serve  God  in  action,  or  do  the  will  of  his 
mistress,  or  minister  to  men  by  showing  them  a 
little  beauty.  But  it  is  before  all  things  an 
escape. 

Mr.  Symons  finds  in  his  system  of  aesthetics 
an  escape  from  Methodism  and  the  Calvinistic 
threatenings  of  his  childhood.  He  wishes  to 
escape  '  hell.1  In  the  story  of  Seaward  Lack- 
land there  is  a  preacher  whom  Methodism  drove 
to  madness.  Mr.  Symons  has  turned  to  Art  so 
that  he  may  not  feel  the  eternal  flames  taking 
hold  of  him. 


Ill 


ONE  endeavours  to  remember  some  one  or  two 
outstanding  novels  written  by  any  one  of  the 
writers  of  this  group.  It  must  be  at  once  ad- 
mitted, one  fails  to  recall  a  great  novel.  It  is 
true  that  the  great  Victorians,  Meredith  and 
Hardy,  were  hard  at  work  at  this  time ;  but, 
then,  neither  of  these  writers  belongs  to  this 
movement.  Then  there  was  Kipling,  Stevenson, 
Barrie,  and  George  Moore.  With  the  excep- 
tion of  the  last,  we  have  little  to  do  with  these 
here.  They  do  not  come  within  the  scope  of 
the  present  study. 

None  of  the  men  of  the  nineties  (as  I  have 
defined  them)  produced  a  great  novel.  It 
would  be  well,  however,  to  give  at  once  some 
connotation  for  so  loose  a  term  as  'a  great 
novel.'  Let  us  then  say  that  a  good  English 
novel  is  not  necessarily  a  great  novel ;  nor,  for 
that  matter,  is  a  good  Russian  novel  necessarily 
a  great  novel.  A  great  novel  is  a  work  of 
fiction  that  has  entered  into  the  realm  of  uni- 
versal literature  in  the  same  way  as  the  dramas 
55 


THE   MEN  OF  THE  NINETIES 

of  Sophocles  and  Shakespeare  and  Moliere  have 
entered  that  glorious  demesne.  As  a  matter 
of  fact,  one  can  remember,  I  think  in  most 
cases,  very  few  English  novels  that  are  great  in 
this  sense ;  while  there  are  many  more  French 
and  Russian  works  that  have  an  undeniable 
right  to  this  title.  Therefore  it  is  not,  perhaps, 
so  damaging  a  criticism  of  the  period  as  it 
might  at  first  sight  appear  to  say  it  has  produced 
no  great  novel. 

But  in  so  far  as  English  fiction  alone  is  con- 
cerned, it  cannot  be  said  that  the  men  of  the 
nineties  produced  work  of  a  very  high  order  in 
this  form.  They  do  not  seem  to  have  had  the 
staying  power  demanded  in  such  artistic  pro- 
duction. The  short  poem,  the  short  story,  the 
small  black  and  white  drawing,  the  one  act 
play — in  fact,  any  form  of  art  that  just  dis- 
plays the  climacteric  moment  and  discards  the 
rest  pleased  them.  It  was,  as  John  Davidson 
said,  an  age  of  Bovril.  While  the  novel,  it 
must  be  admitted,  needs  either  a  profusion  of 
ideas,  as  in  the  case  of  the  Russians,  or  of 
genitals,  as  in  the  case  of  the  French.  But  the 
art  of  the  nineties  was  essentially  an  expression 
of  moods — and  moods,  after  all,  are  such  evanes- 
cent brief  conditions.  So  it  is  not  unnatural 
that  the  fruition  of  the  novel  was  not  rich 
56 


THE   MEN   OF  THE   NINETIES 

among  these  writers.  George  Gissing  and 
George  Moore,  in  a  way  their  forebears  (I  have 
in  mind  more  particularly  the  latter),  spread  a 
taste  for  such  works.  Indeed,  in  his  Confessions 
of  a  Young  Man,  George  Moore  may  be  said 
to  have  predicted  the  masculine  type  of  the 
nineties.  Gissing  in  1891  was  to  daunt  some 
with  his  New  Grub  Street,  while  Henry  James 
was  to  inspire  enthusiasm  in  a  few  like  Hubert 
Crack  an thorpe.  But  naturally  in  the  way  of 
stimulus  the  main  goad  was  France,  which  was 
at  that  date  phenomenally  rich  in  practitioners 
of  the  art  of  the  novel.  The  Vizetelly  Zolas, 
Mr.  George  Moore  personally  conducting  the 
novels  of  certain  of  the  French  novelists  over 
the  Channel,  the  desire  to  smash  the  fetters  of 
Victorian  fiction  which  Thomas  Hardy  was  to 
accomplish,  were  all  inspiring  sources  which 
were,  however,  singularly  unfruitful.  Walter 
Pater  long  before  in  his  academic  romance 
Marius,  which  they  had  all  read  eagerly,  wrote 
charmingly  of  a  field  that  would  appeal  to 
them  when  he  said  :  '  Life  in  modern  London 
...  is  stuff'  sufficient  for  the  fresh  imagination  of 
a  youth  to  build  his  "  palace  of  art "  of.'  But 
instead  of  taking  the  recommendation  of  this 
high  priest  they  read  Dorian  Gray,  which  Wilde 
would  never  have  written  if  Huysmans  had  not 
57 


THE   MEN   OF  THE   NINETIES 

first  written  A  Rebours.  The  young  men  of 
Henley,  it  must  be  confessed,  did  far  finer  work 
than  Richard  Le  Gallienne's  watery  Wildism 
in  Tlie  Quest  of  the  Golden  Girl.  George 
Moore  wrote  a  masterpiece  in  Evelyn  Innes, 
but  Ernest  Dowson  and  Arthur  Moore  in  A 
Comedy  of  Masks  and  Adrian  Rome  did  not 
retaliate.  Leonard  Merrick,  who  started  pub- 
lishing in  the  eighties,  did  not  publish  his  best 
work  till  the  nineties  were  dead  and  gone  ; 
while  his  best  Bohemian  Paris  stories  may  owe 
as  much  to  Du  Maurier's  Trilby  (1894)  as  they 
do  to  Henri  Murger.  Henry  Harland,  as  I 
have  already  said,  only  struck  his  vein  of 
comedy  fiction  when  the  Boer  War  had  finished 
the  movement.  George  Gissing  and  Arthur 
Morrison  belong,  with  Frank  Harris,  to  the 
pugilistic  school  of  Henley's  young  men, 
while  Richard  Whiteing,  who  turned  from 
journalism  to  write  No.  5  John  Street  (1899), 
was  too  old  a  man  and  too  late  with  his  book 
to  belong  to  the  nineties'1  group.  Arthur 
Machen,  in  those  days,  belonged  to  the  short 
story  writers  with  Hubert  Crackanthorpe,  who 
was  the  great  imaginative  prose  writer  of 
the  group.  The  sailor,  Joseph  Conrad,  the 
Austialian  Louis  Becke,  the  Canadian,  C.  G.  D. 
Roberts,  were  working  out  their  own  salvation, 
58 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

and  had  nothing  to  do  with  the  Rhymers1  Club. 
The  strong  creative  brain  of  Aubrey  Beardsley, 
indeed,  in  his  unfinished  picaresque  romance, 
Under  the  Hill,  which  I  have  already  mentioned, 
produced  something  new,  but  it  was  not  a  novel; 
while  it  is  John  Davidson's  poetry  that  counts, 
not  his  novels,  which  remain  unread  nowadays 
on  the  shelf. 

Indeed,  if  the  name  of  a  good  English  novel 
by  any  one  of  them  is  demanded,  it  will  be 
singularly  difficult  to  suggest  a  satisfactory  title. 
One  can  even  go  further,  and  state  that  they 
did  not  even  have  one  amongst  them  who  has 
handed  on  to  us  a  vivid  picture  of  their  own 
lives  in  the  form  of  fiction.  Dowson,  indeed, 
in  the  dock  life  of  his  books  may  have  auto- 
biographical touches,  but  they  are  purely  per- 
sonal. What  I  mean  is,  that  there  was  no  one 
standing  by  to  give  us  a  picture  of  them  as 
Willy,  the  French  writer,  has  given  us  of  the 
sceptical  yet  juvenile  enthusiasm  of  Les  Jeunes 
of  Paris  of  the  same  period  in,  for  example,  his 
Matiresse  d*  Esthetes.  What  is  cruder  than 
Ranger-Gull's  The  Hypocrite,  which  has  preten- 
sions to  be  a  picture  of  the  young  men  of  the 
period  ?  And  when  one  comes  to  think  of  it  this 
is  a  great  pity,  as  an  excellent  novel  might  have 
been  penned  around  the  feverish  activities  of 
59 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

these  young  exotics  of  the  nineties.  Robert 
Hichens'  Green  Carnation  is,  after  all,  perhaps 
the  most  brilliant  attempt  to  picture  the  weak- 
nesses of  the  period,  and  it  is  merely  a  skit 
taking  off  in  the  characters  of  Esme  Amarinth 
and  Lord  Reggie  two  well-known  personalities. 
The  Adventures  of  John  Johns,  it  is  true,  is 
supposed  to  be  the  history  of  the  rise  of  one  of 
the  smaller  epigoni  of  the  movement,  but  it  is 
not  a  very  brilliant  achievement,  though  it  has 
considerable  merit  and  interest.  One  cannot 
indeed  say  that  it  is  up  to  the  standard  of 
Ernest  La  Jeunesse's  Odin  Howes,  wherein  the 
French  Jew  has  given  a  veritable  flashing  in- 
sight on  the  last  days  of  Wilde  in  Paris  and 
those  holes  into  which  he  crept  to  drink. 
What  a  pity,  indeed,  an  English  contemporary 
has  not  done  the  same  for  the  Tite  Street  days, 
or  given  us  in  his  book  a  serious  study  of  the 
strange  world  of  Whistler  or  Dowson. 

In  the  face  of  this  strange  dearth  of  novels 
in  this  school  one  cannot  help  asking  the 
reasons  that  engendered  it.  Without  laying 
down  any  hard  and  fast  rules,  it  will,  I  think, 
be  seen  that  this  vacuity  came  from  the 
Zeitgeist  of  the  group  itself.  As  has  been  said, 
the  large  canvas,  the  five-act  play,  the  long 
novel  were  demode  for  the  period.  The  age 
60 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

demanded,  after  the  long  realistic  studies  of 
the  eighties  in  France,  the  climacteric  moments 
only  when  the  passions  of  the  personce  of  the 
drama  were  at  white  heat,  so  to  speak,  and 
life  was  lived  intensely.  Could  not  the  great 
scene  up  to  which  the  five  long  acts  lead  be 
squeezed  into  one  ?  Was  not  the  rediscovery 
of  the  Mimes  of  Herod  as  a  sign  of  the  times  ? 
Could  not  the  great  beauty  of  an  immense 
landscape's  spirit  be  caught  and  seized  on  a 
small  canvas  ?  Could  not  the  long-winded 
novel  of  three  tomes  be  whittled  down  to  the 
actual  short-story  motive  ?  This  reduction  of 
everything  to  its  climax  can  be  seen  in  all  the 
art  of  the  period.  Look  at  Beardsley's  decora- 
tion for  Wilde's  Salomt,  entitled  itself  'The 
Climax.'  Conder  paints  small  objects  like 
fans  and  diminutive  water-colours  and  Crackan- 
thorpe  writes  short  stories.  The  poems  of 
Dowson  are  short  swallow  flights  of  song,  and 
the  epic  is  reduced  to  Stephen  Phillips's 
Marpessa.  The  one-act  play  begins  on  the 
Continent  to  make  a  big  appeal  for  more 
recognition  than  that  of  a  curtain-raiser. 
Small  theatres,  particularly  in  Germany  and 
Austria,  give  evening  performances  consisting 
of  one-acters  alone.  It  becomes  the  same  in 
music.  The  age  was  short-winded  and  its  art, 
61 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

to  borrow  a  phrase  from  the  palaestra,  could 
only  stay  over  short  distances.  So,  whereas 
there  is  a  strange  dearth  of  novels,  the  men 
of  the  nineties  were  very  fruitful  in  short 
stories.  In  fact,  it  would  not  be  perhaps  too 
much  to  say  that  it  was  then,  for  the  first 
time  in  English  literature,  the  short  story 
came  into  its  own.  At  any  rate,  it  would  be 
more  judicious  to  put  the  period  as  one  in 
which  the  short  story  flourished  vigorously  (if 
not  for  the  first  time),  in  England,  as  a  '  theme 
of  art."1  To  understand  exactly  what  I  mean 
by  this  artistic  treatment  of  the  short  story1  as 
a  medium  of  literary  expression,  all  that  is 
necessary  is,  perhaps,  to  compare  one  of 
Dickens's  short  tales,  for  example,  with  one  of 
Stevenson's  short  stories.  The  result  is  apparent 
at  once  in  the  difference  of  treatment — a  differ- 
ence as  essential  as  the  difference  between  the 
effect  of  a  figure  in  stone  and  another  in 
bronze.  The  earlier  tale  has  none  of  the  facets 
and  subtleties  that  art  has  contrived  to  express 
by  the  latter  narration.  This  artistic  treat- 
ment of  the  short  story  by  Englishmen,  then, 
was  a  new  thing  and  a  good  thing  for  English 

1  Frederick  Wedmore  in  On  Books  and  Arts  (1899) 
discusses  the  short  story  as  a  distinct  artistic  medium. 
It  can  never  be  a  '  novel  in  a  nutshell.' 

62 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

literature.  If  the  long  staying  powers  required 
for  the  great  novel  in  the  world  of  comparative 
literature  did  not  belong  to  the  writers  of 
the  nineties  group,  at  any  rate  they  developed, 
more  or  less  artistically,  the  climacteric  effects 
of  the  conte.  For  the  short  story  crossed  the 
Channel  by  means  of  Guy  de  Maupassant,  and 
out  of  it  arose  on  this  side  for  a  brief  decade 
or  so  a  wonderful  wealth  of  art.  The  short 
stories  of  Kipling  are  by  no  means  the  only 
pebbles  on  the  beach.  In  fact,  never  even  in 
France  itself  was  there  such  variety  of  theme  and 
treatment.  The  successful  short  stories  of  the 
period  are  of  all  sorts  and  conditions.  To 
exemplify  as  briefly  as  possible  this  variety  is 
perhaps  closer  to  my  purpose  than  to  waste 
time  in  proving  such  obvious  facts  as  the 
anxious  endeavours  of  all  these  writers  to 
raise  their  work  to  the  artistic  elevation  de- 
manded of  the  short  story,  or  their  strenuous 
struggle  to  attain  a  suitable  style  and  treat- 
ment for  their  themes. 

Numerous  examples  of  their  art  at  once 
crowd  the  mind,  such  as  Ernest  Dowson's 
Dying  of  Francis  Donne,  Max  Beerbohm's 
Happy  Hypocrite,  Frederick  Wedmore's  tender 
Orgeas  and  Miradou,  Arthur  Symons's  Death 
of  Peter  Waydelin,  the  works  of  Hubert 
63 


Crackanthorpe,  or  the  fantastic  tales  of  Arthur 
Machen,  or  Eric  Count  StenbockV  Studies  of 
Death.  H.  D.  Lowry,  though  of  Henley's 
young  men,  works  at  the  same  art  of  studies  in 
sentiment  in  his  Womerfs  Tragedies.  So  does 
Mr.  G.  S.  Street  in  his  Episodes  and  George 
Egerton  in  her  Discords  and  Keynotes.  Among 
the  others  who  deliberately  tried  to  write  the 
short  story  as  an  artistic  theme  at  that  period 
and  who  were  at  the  same  time  in  the  move- 
ment can  be  mentioned  Henry  Harland,  Rudolf 
Dircks  in  his  Verisimilitudes,  Richard  Le 

1  Eric  Stenbock  was  at  Balliol,  Oxford.  He  collaborated 
in  a  volume  of  translations  of  Balzac's  '  Short  Stories.' 
He  contributed  to  Lord  Alfred  Douglas's  The  Spirit  Lamp. 
As  a  specimen  of  his  style  the  following  extract  from  his 
short  story,  The  Other  Side,  may  be  offered.  It  is  sup- 
posed to  be  an  old  Breton  woman's  description  of  the 
Black  Mass : 

4  Then  when  they  get  to  the  top  of  the  hill,  there  is  an 
altar  with  six  candles  quite  black  and  a  sort  of  something 
in  between,  that  nobody  sees  quite  clearly,  and  the  old 
black  ram  with  the  man's  face  and  long  horns  begins  to 
say  Mass  in  a  sort  of  gibberish  nobody  understands, 
and  two  black  strange  things  like  monkeys  glide  about 
with  the  book  and  the  cruets — and  there's  music  too, 
such  music.  There  are  things  the  top  half  like  black 
cats,  and  the  bottom  part  like  men  only  their  legs  are 
all  covered  with  close  black  hair,  and  they  play  on  the 
bag-pipes,  and  when  they  come  to  the  elevation  then — . 
Amid  the  old  crones  there  was  lying  on  the  hearth-rug, 
before  the  fire,  a  boy  whose  large  lovely  eyes  dilated 
and  whose  limbs  quivered  in  the  very  ecstacy  of  terror.' 

64 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

Gallienne,  Kenneth  Grahame,  Percy  Heming- 
way in  his  Out  of  Egypt,  etc.  Then  we 
have  men  like  R.  B.  Cunninghame  Graham 
and  H.  W.  Nevinson,  clearly  influenced  by  the 
movement  and  writing  alongside  of  it  of  the 
ends  of  the  earth  they  have  visited.  The 
former,  for  example,  in  a  short  story  like 
Aurora  La  Cujini  (Smithers,  1898)  clearly 
reflects  the  influences  of  this  period  which 
gloried  in  the  abnormal  in  Art.  Known  as  a 
socialist  of  courage,  Mr.  Graham,  whose  name 
betrays  his  origin,  has  also  visited  many  of  the 
exotic  places  of  the  world.  In  his  able  book 
Mogreb-el-Acksa  he  has  given  us  vignettes  of 
Morocco  that  are  unsurpassed  ;  in  his  volume 
Success  he  has  told  us  of  those  Spanish -speak- 
ing races  of  South  America,  of  the  tango,  and 
the  horses  of  the  pampas,  and  the  estancias  he 
knows  so  well.  In  Aurora  La  Cujini  we  have 
a  vignette  of  Seville  so  realistic  that  we  almost 
believe  that  one  is  justified  in  considering  that 
there  is  just  enough  motive  in  it  to  vivify  it 
with  the  quickening  touch  of  the  short  story- 
teller's wand.  It  is  slow  in  starting,  but 
when  this  motive  comes  suddenlv  at  the  end 
we  are  almost  left  breathless,  realising  that 
everything  that  went  before  was  but  a  slow, 
ruthless  piling  up  of  local  colour.  It  is  all 
65  F 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

done  with  such  deliberate  deftness.  How  we 
see  the  scenes  unrolling  slowly  before  us.  Like 
the  thrilled  people  on  the  benches  we  watch 
the  Toreador  about  to  make  his  kill  as  we 
read : 

*  The  "  espada"  had  come  forward,  mumbled 
his  boniment  in  Andaluz,  swung  his  montera 
over  his  shoulder  upon  the  ground,  and  after 
sticking  his  sword  in  every  quarter  of  the  bull 
had  butchered  him  at  last  amid  the  applause 
of    the   assembled   populace.      Blood   on   the 
sand  ;  sun  on  the  white  plaza;  upon  the  women's 
faces  "cascarilla";  scarlet  and  yellow  fans,  and 
white  mantillas  with  "  fleco  y  alamares"  in  the 
antique  style  .  .  . ;  women  selling  water,  calling 
out  "  agua ! "  in  so  guttural  a  voice  it  seemed 
like  Arabic ;  Cardobese  hats,  short  jackets,  and 
from  the  plaza  a  scent  of  blood  and  sweat  act- 
ing like  a  rank   aphrodisiac  upon  the  crowd, 
and   making  the  women  squeeze  each  other's 
sweating  hands,  and  look  ambiguously  at  one 
another,   as  they  were  men  ;  and  causing  the 
youths,  with  swaying  hips  and  with  their  hair 
cut  low  upon  their  foreheads,  to    smile  with 
open  lips  and  eyes  that  met  your  glance,  as 
they  had  been  half  women.     Blood,  harlotry, 
sun,   gay  colours,   flowers  and    waving   palm- 
trees,  women  with  roses  stuck  behind  their  ears, 
66 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

mules  covered  up  in  harness  of  red  worsted, 
cigar  girls,  gipsies,  tourists,  soldiers,  and  the 
little  villainous-looking  urchins,  who,  though 
born  old,  do  duty  as  children  in  the  South/ 

As  we  read  this  magical  evocation  of  the 
spirit  of  place  we  rub  our  eyes  and  ask  our- 
selves have  we  not  been  there.  This  prose  of 
vivid  impressionism  is  the  goal  of  one  and  all. 
As  the  plein  air  school  painted  in  the  open  air 
before  Nature,  so  these  men  must  write  as 
closely  round  their  subject  as  actual  experience 
can  allow  them.  The  vivid  realisation  of  a 
mood,  as  we  shall  see  in  Hubert  Crackanthorpe, 
is  the  desired  prize.  Turn  through  the  pages 
of  Ernest  Dowson's  Dilemmas,  and  read,  above 
all,  A  Case  of  Conscience ;  leaf  Frederick  Wed- 
more's1  Renunciations,  and  pause  over  The 

1  About  the  worst  of  Frederick  Wedmore's  short  stories, 
such  as  The  North  Coast  and  Eleanor,  there  is  a  hint  of 
the  melodrama  of  Hugh  Conway's  Called  Back,  but  it  is 
a  feeble  replica  of  the  original.  The  most  successful  of 
his  short  imaginative  pieces,  as  the  author  rightly  terms 
them,  on  the  other  hand,  have  a  refined  grace  of  slow 
movement  that  is  at  once  captivating  and  refreshing.  It 
seems  impossible  that  the  same  man  could  have  essayed 
both  the  worst  and  the  best.  As  a  specimen  of  the 
latter  type  of  work,  let  me  fasten  on  to  the  description 
of  the  entourage  of  Pelse  the  chemist,  the  man  with  the 
tastes  above  his  position  : 

'  There  came  a  little  snow.  But  in  the  parlour  over 
the  shop — with  the  three  windows  closely  curtained — one 

67 


THE   MEN   OF  THE   NINETIES 

Chemist  in  the  Suburbs,  wherein,  as  H.  D.  Traill 
said,  the  story  of  Richard  Pelse's  life  is  a  pure 
joy ;  in  both  cases  vivid  impressionism  and 
mood  realisation  are  the  keynotes  of  the  work. 
To  understand  these  tendencies  better  and  the 
excellence  of  the  work  achieved,  it  will  be  more 
advantageous,  perhaps,  to  consider  in  more 
detail  one  writer  only  who  carried  the  charm 
of  the  prose  pen  to  a  higher  degree  of  em- 
phasis and  finish  in  the  short  story  than  any  of 
the  others,  to  wit,  Hubert  Crackanthorpe. 

A  curious  anomaly  can  be  remarked  here, 
that  in  this  period  the  great  work  of  prose 
fiction  was  not  to  be  resharpened  by  the  young 
men  to  nearly  the  same  extent  as  they  re- 
sharpened  the  poetry  and  the  essay.  None 

could  have  forgetfulness  of  weather.  There  was  the  neat 
fireplace ;  the  little  low  tea-table ;  a  bookcase  in  which 
Pelse — before  that  critical  event  at  Aix-les- Bains — had 
been  putting,  gradually,  first  editions  of  the  English 
poets  ;  a  cabinet  of  china,  in  which — but  always  before 
Aix-les-Bains — he  had  taken  to  accumulate  some  pretty 
English  things  of  whitest  paste  or  finest  painting  ;  a 
Worcester  cup,  with  its  exotic  birds,  its  lasting  gold,  its 
scale-blue  ground,  like  lapis  lazuli  or  sapphire  ;  a  Chelsea 
figure  ;  something  from  Swansea  ;  white  plates  of  Nant- 
garw,  bestrewn  with  Billingsley's  greyish  pink  roses,  of 
which  he  knew  the  beauty,  the  free  artistic  touch.  How 
the  things  had  lost  interest  for  him!  "From  the  mo- 
ment," says  some  French  critic,  "  that  a  woman  occupies 
me,  my  collection  does  not  exist."  And  many  a  woman 
may  lay  claim  to  occupy  a  French  art  critic ;  only  one 
had  occupied  Richard  Pelse. ' 

68 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

approach  Meredith  and  Hardy,  who  move  like 
Titans  of  the  age,  while  Kipling  and  Crackan- 
thorpe  are  the  only  two  young  men  that  give 
any  quantity  of  imaginative  prose  work  of  a 
high  new  order  (and  in  saying  this  one  must  not 
overlook  Arthur  Morrison's  Mean  Streets,  or 
ZangwilFs  Ghetto  Tales,  or  the  work  of  Henry 
James)  until  Conrad  came  from  the  sea  and 
Louis  Becke  from  Australia  to  give  new  vistas 
to  our  fiction.  But  it  is  not  with  them  we  are 
concerned  here,  but  with  Hubert  Crackan- 
thorpe,1  of  whose  life  the  poet  has  sung : 

Too  rough  his  sea,  too  dark  its  angry  tides  ! 

Things  of  a  day  are  we,  shadows  that  move 
The  lands  of  shadow. 

Crackanthorpe  commenced  his  literary  career 
as  the  editor,  with  W.  H.  Wilkins,  of  The 
Albemarle,  a  monthly  review  started  in  January, 
1892,  with  a  splendid  supplement  lithograph. 
Wreckage,  the  younger  writer's  first  volume, 
appeared  in  1893,  and  contains  seven  studies  of 
very  unequal  merit.  Its  French  inspiration  as 
well  as  its  French  emulation  is  at  once  apparent, 

1  It  is  interesting  to  note  the  verses  also  of  the  French 
poet  Francis  Jammes  dedicated  to  Crackanthorpe. 
Jarames  lived  at  Orthez  when  Crackanthorpe  visited 
that  remote  countryside. 

69 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

for  in  place  of  a  foreword  is  the  simple,  all- 
sufficing  French  quotation  as  a  keynote  of  the 
type  of  work  displayed :  '  Que  le  roman  ait 
cette  religion  que  le  siecle  passe  appelait  de  ce 
large  et  vaste  nom  :  "  Humanite""; — il  lui  suffit 
de  cette  conscience ;  son  droit  est  la.'  The 
youth  of  the  writer  (he  was  only  twenty-eight) 
must  be  remembered  when  discussing  the  in- 
equality of  these  studies  in  passion,  for  all 
hinge  on  the  old  eternal  theme.  The  last  three 
are  perhaps  more  finished  work  than  the  first 
four,  and  this  is  a  pity  from  the  point  of  view 
of  the  reader.  Profiles,  indeed,  the  longest,  is 
also  in  some  respects  the  worst  -  conceived 
attempt.  It  is  crude  and  immature  in  con- 
ception and  projection.  A  young  officer,  in 
love  with  Lily  Maguire,  is  deceived  by  her  for 
a  very  Emily  Bronte-like  figure  of  a  bold,  bad, 
handsome  man.  The  girl  becomes  a  disreput- 
able member  of  the  prostitute  class,  and  Maurice, 
like  the  young  fool  he  is,  wishes  to  redeem  her. 
But  Lily,  whom  the  sensuous,  romantic  life  has 
taught  nothing,  could  never,  she  thinks,  marry 
a  man  she  did  not  care  for,  although  she  would 
sell  herself  to  the  first  Tom,  Dick,  or  Harry. 
A  Conflict  of  Egoisms  concerns  two  people  who 
have  wasted  their  lives  and  then  utterly  destroy 
themselves  by  marrying  one  another,  for  they 
70 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

were  too  selfish  to   live   even   by  themselves. 
The  Struggle  for  Life  is  a  Maupassant-con- 
ceived, but   ineffectively  told  story  of  a  wife 
betrayed  by  her  husband,  who  sells  herself  for 
half-a-crown  if  she  can  go  home  in  an  hour. 
Embers  is  much  more  effectively  told,  and  here 
at  last  we  begin  to  realise  Crackanthorpe  is 
getting  at  the  back  of   his  characters.      The 
same  applies  to  that  able  gambling  story,  When 
Greek  meets  Greek,  while  in  A  Dead  Woman  we 
have  Crackanthorpe  at  last  in  his  full  stride. 
Rushout   the   innkeeper,    inconsolable   for   his 
dead    wife,    is   as   real   as    '  bony  and    gaunt ' 
Jonathan   Hays,   who  was   the  dead   woman's 
lover.      How  the  husband  discovers  the  dead 
woman's  infidelity ;  how  he  and  Hays  were  to 
have  fought ;  and  how  at  last  '  each  remem- 
bered that  she  had  belonged  to  the  other,  and, 
at  that  moment,  they  felt  instinctively  drawn 
together,'  is  told  by  a  master's  hand  with  a  slow 
deliberation  that  is  as  relentless  as  life  itself. 
Here  the  narrative  is  direct  and  the  delineation 
of  character  sharp.     These  two  men  with  the 
card-sharper  Simon  live,  while  as  for  the  women 
of  the  book  we  wish  to  forget  them,  for  they 
have  nothing  to  redeem  them  except  possibly 
the  little  French  girl  from  Nice. 
1  Maupassant's  Inc&nsolables. 

71 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

Two  years  later  appeared  a  far  more  am- 
bitious and  maturer  volume  containing  half-a- 
dozen  sentimental  studies  and  half- a -do/en 
tales  of  the  French  villages  Craekanthorpe  so 
loved  and  understood.  His  method  of  work 
becomes  more  pronounced  here,  that  is  to  treat 
an  English  theme  in  the  French  manner,  a  task 
which  demands  more  culture  than  the  ruck  of 
the  conteurs  for  the  English  magazines  attain 
with  their  facile  tears  and  jackass  laughters, 
their  machine-like  nonentities  and  pudibond 
ineptitudes.  Craekanthorpe,  indeed,  has  left 
no  following  behind  him,  and  only  once  later 
can  I  recall  a  volume  of  short  stories  that 
suggests  his  manner :  J.  Y.  F.  Cooke's  tales 
of  the  nineties  in  his  Stories  of  Strange 
Women. 

In  this  new  volume  as  before,  Craekanthorpe 
devotes  himself  to  the  expansion  of  the  senti- 
mental study,  the  problems  of  sexual  relation- 
ships, which  are  not  altogether  pleasing  to 
every  one,  and  this  may  account  for  his  limited 
appeal.  In  Wreckage  all  the  women  were  vile, 
but  here  he  evidently  intends  to  picture  the 
other  side  of  women  in  Ella,  the  wife  of  the 
poet  Hillier,  with  its  slow  Flaubert  unrolling 
of  her  infinite  delusion.  In  Battledore  and 
Shuttlecock,  in  Nita,  of  the  old  Empire 
72 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

promenade  days,  he  again  develops  the  good 
side.  While  in  the  study  of  the  Love-sick 
Curate  we  feel  that  Ethel  is  not  hard-hearted, 
but  only  that  the  Rev.  Burkett  is  an  unutter- 
able idiot.  Modern  Melodrama  is  the  short, 
sharp  climacteric  stab  of  Maupassant  perhaps 
not  over  well  done.  The  sentimental  studies 
close  with  Yew-Trees  and  Peacocks,  which 
seems  rather  to  have  lost  its  point  in  the 
telling.  The  tales  of  the  Pyrennese  villages 
where  Crackanthorpe  used  to  stay  are  typical 
productions  of  the  delight  of  the  men  of  the 
nineties  in  their  sojourning  on  the  sacred  soil 
of  France.  The  White  Maize,  Etienne  Motion, 
and  Gaston  Lalanne's  Child  are  perhaps  not  un- 
worthy of  the  master  himself  in  their  simple 
directness,  devoid  of  all  unnecessary  padding. 
With  a  few  phrases,  indeed,  Crackanthorpe 
can  lay  his  scene,  strip  his  characters  nude 
before  us.  How  we  realise,  for  instance,  Ella 
lying  in  bed  the  night  before  her  mistaken 
marriage  with  Hillier.  She  is  there  in  all 
the  virgin  simplicity  of  the  average  English 
country  girl : 

The   window  was  wide  open,   and   the   muslin 

curtains  swaying  in  the   breeze   bulged   towards 

her   weirdly.      She   could   see    the   orchard  trees 

bathed  in  blackness,  and  above  a  square  of  sky, 

73 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

blue-grey,  quivering  with  stifled  light,  flecked 
with  a  disorder  of  stars  that  seemed  ready  to  rain 
upon  the  earth.  After  a  while,  little  by  little, 
she  distinguished  the  forms  of  the  trees.  Slowly, 
monstrous,  and  sleek,  the  yellow  moon  was 
rising. 

She  was  no  longer  thinking  of  herself  !  She 
had  forgotten  that  to-morrow  was  her  wedding- 
day  :  for  a  moment,  quite  impersonally,  she 
watched  the  moonlight  stealing  through  the 
trees. 

Again,  Ronald,  the  youth  from  the  Army 
Crammer's,  finds  his  way  into  the  music-hall, 
where  he  encounters  Nita  : 

Immediately  he  enterud  the  theatre,  the  sudden 
sight  of  the  scene  stopped  him,  revealed,  as  it 
were,  through  a  great  gap.  The  stage  blazed 
white  ;  masses  of  recumbent  girls,  bathed  in  soft 
tints,  swayed  to  dreamy  cadence  of  muffled 
violins  before  the  quivering  gold-flecked  minarets 
of  an  Eastern  palace.  He  leaned  against  the 
side  of  the  lounge  to  gaze  down  across  the  black 
belt  of  heads.  The  sight  bewildered  him.  By- 
and-bye,  he  became  conscious  of  a  hum  of  voices, 
and  a  continual  movement  behind  him.  Men.  for 
the  most  part  in  evening  dress,  were  passing  in  pro- 
cession to  and  fro,  some  women  amongst  them,  smil- 
ing as  they  twittered  mirthlessly  ;  now  and  then 
he  caught  glimpses  of  others  seated  before  little 
round  tables,  vacant,  impassive,  like  waxwork 
figures,  he  thought.  .  .  .  He  was  throbbing  with 
trepidating  curiosity,  buffeted  bv  irresolution. 
74 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

With  the  same  exactitude  the  lonely  fells 
around  Scarsdale,  where  Burkett  is  parson  of 
the  small  Cumberland  village,  arise  before  us. 

His  posthumous  volume,  Last  Studies,  con- 
tains only  three  rather  long  short  stories,  an 
'  in  memoriam  '  poem  by  Stopford  A.  Brooke, 
and  an  appreciation  very  gracefully  done  by 
Henry  James.  Referring  in  the  field  of 
fiction  to  the  crudity  of  the  old  hands  and 
the  antiquity  of  new,  his  appreciator  finds  it 
difficult  to  render  the  aspect  which  constitutes 
Crackanthorpe's  '  troubled  individual  note.' 
He  comes  to  the  conclusion,  l  What  appealed 
to  him  was  the  situation  that  asked  for  a 
certain  fineness  of  art,  and  that  could  best  be 
presented  in  a  kind  of  foreshortened  picture.' 

The  short  story  is  mainly  of  two  sorts : 
4  The  chain  of  items,  figures  in  a  kind  of  sum 
— one  of  the  simple  rules — of  movement, 
added  up  as  on  a  school-boy's  slate,  and 
with  the  correct  total  and  its  little  flc-urish, 
constituting  the  finish  and  accounting  for  the 
effect ;  or  else  it  may  be  an  effort  preferably 
pictorial,  a  portrait  of  conditions,  an  attempt 
to  summarise,  and  compress  for  purposes  of 
presentation  to  "  render  "  even,  if  possible,  for 
purposes  of  expression.1  From  the  French 
Crackanthorpe  learnt  the  latter  method,  and 
75 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

practised  it.  When  we  come  to  look  at  these 
last  three  stories  (which  with  the  tiny  collec- 
tion of  Vignettes  completes  his  work)  we  see 
how  admirably  exact  is  this  criticism  of  his 
senior. 

In  Antony  Garstirfs  Courtship  he  is  back  in 
his  own  countryside  of  Cumberland  among 
the  shrewd,  hard  Dale  folk.  It  is  a  little 
masterpiece  conceived  almost  in  the  hopeless 
bitterness  of  Hardy  at  his  darkest,  most 
pessimistic  moment.  The  crudeness  in  work- 
manship has  gone,  only  the  relentless  inevita- 
bility of  it  all  remains  like  the  tragedies 
of  life  itself.  Rosa  Blencarn,  the  parson's 
niece,  a  mere  cheap  flirt  of  unfinished  comeli- 
ness, is  but  the  bone  of  contention  between  the 
personalities  of  Antony  and  his  mother.  The 
widow  Garstin  is  as  fine  a  character  as  Crackan- 
thorpe,  in  his  twenty-two  stories,  has  created. 
She  lives,  and  in  her  veins  flows  the  passion  of 
disappointed  age.  '  She  was  a  heavy -built 
woman,  upright,  stalwart  almost,  despite  her 
years.  Her  face  was  gaunt  and  sallow ;  deep 
wrinkles  accentuated  the  hardness  of  her 
features.  She  wore  a  widow's  black  cap  above 
her  iron-grey  hair,  gold-rimmed  spectacles,  and 
a  soiled  chequered  apron.'  How  easily  we  can 
see  her  saying  to  her  great  hulking  son  : 
76 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

'  T"  hoose  be  mine,  f  Lord  be  praised,1  she 
continued  in  a  loud,  hard  voice,  '  an1  as  long  as 
he  spare  me,  Tony,  Til  na1  see  Rosa  Blencarn 
set  foot  inside  it."* 

It  has  all  the  unsavoury  cruelty  of  humanity, 
and  to  find  other  such  scenes  in  English  litera- 
ture we  have  to  come  down  to  Caradoc  Evanses 
My  People,  or  James  Joyce. 

In  Trevor  Perkins,  in  a  brief  masterly  way, 
we  have  the  soul  of  the  average  young  man  of 
the  nineties,  who  has  ceased  to  believe  in  God 
or  tolerate  his  parents,  sketched  for  us.  He 
walks  out  with  the  waitress  of  his  bunshop,  and 
we  realise  at  once  he  is  of  those  who  are 
doomed  to  make  fools  of  themselves  on  the 
reef  of  her  sex.  The  last  story,  The  Turn  of 
the  Wheel,  is  the  history  of  the  daughter 
who  believes  in  her  self-made  father,  and 
despises  her  sidetracked  mother  as  an  in- 
ferior being,  only  to  find  she  has  made  a  great 
mistake.  It  is  one  of  the  longest  stories  he 
wrote,  and  moves  easily  in  the  higher  strata  of 
London  society.  From  this  fashionable  world 
to  the  rude  and  rugged  scars  and  fells  of 
Cumberland  is  a  far  cry  ;  but  here,  as  else- 
where, Crackanthorpe  finds  the  friction  of 
humanity  is  its  own  worst  enemy.  Yet  be- 
hind all  this  impenetrably  impersonal  bitter 
77 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

play  of  human  passions  in  these  short  stories, 
one  feels  somehow  or  other  the  distant  beats 
of  the  author's  compassionate  heart,  which  his 
sickness  of  life  made  him  forcibly  stop  in  the 
pride  of  his  youth  before  he  had  time  to  realise 
himself  or  fulfil  his  rich  promise. 


78 


IV 


THE  poetry  of  the  period  is  essentially  an 
expression  of  moods  and  sentiments.  It  is  as 
much  a  form  of  impressionism  as  the  art  of 
Monet  and  Renoir.  Further,  it  seeks  after, 
like  all  the  art  of  the  nineties,  that  abnor- 
mality of  proportion  of  which  Bacon  wrote  in 
his  'Essay  on  Beauty/  It  is,  too,  a  period 
wonderfully  fertile  in  song.  Besides  the 
nineties'  group,  which  is  represented  chiefly  by 
the  Rhymers'  Club,  there  were  many  other 
schools  of  song.  Lord  Alfred  Douglas  in  his 
City  of  the  Soul,  Oscar  Wilde  in  his  Sphinx 
and  The  Harlot's  House,  Stephen  Phillips  and 
Henley,  Francis  Thompson  in  his  Hound  of 
Heaven,  are  but  some  of  the  richness  I  am  com- 
pelled to  pass  over  in  order  to  adhere  strictly  to 
the  programme  of  this  rough  summary.  Let 
us,  therefore,  turn  at  once  to  the  Rhymers' 
Club,  whose  origin  and  desires  have  been  so 
well  explained  by  Arthur  Symons,  the  cicerone 
to  the  age,  in  his  essay  on  Ernest  Dowson.  At 
the  Cheshire  Cheese  in  Fleet  Street  it  was 
79 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

arranged  that  a  band  of  young  poets  should 
meet,  striving  to  recapture  in  London  some- 
thing of  the  Gallic  spirit  of  art  and  the  charm 
of  open  discussion  in  the  Latin  Quartier.  The 
Club  consisted  of  the  following  members : 
John  Davidson,  Ernest  Dovvson,  Edwin  J. 
Ellis,  George  Arthur  Greene,  Lionel  Johnson, 
Arthur  Cecil  Hillier,  Richard  Le  Gallienne, 
Victor  Plarr,  Ernest  Radford,  Ernest  Rhys, 
Thomas  William  Rolleston,  Arthur  Symons, 
John  Todhunter,  and  William  Butler  Yeats. 
Besides  these  members,  the  Club,  which  was 
without  rules  or  officers,  had  at  one  time 
affiliated  to  itself  the  following  permanent 
guests  :  John  Gray,  Edward  Rose,  J.  T.  Nettle- 
ship,  Morley  Roberts,  A.  B.  Chamberlain,  Ed- 
ward Garnett,  and  William  Theodore  Peters. 

Oscar  Wilde,  though  never  a  member,  had  a 
great  influence  on  many  of  those  who  were, 
and  Victor  Plarr  describes  a  memorable  meet- 
ing of  the  Rhymers  in  Mr.  Herbert  Home's 
rooms  in  the  Fitzroy  settlement  at  which  Wilde 
appeared.  The  poet  goes  on :  '  It  was  an  even- 
ing of  notabilities.  Mr.  Walter  Crane  stood 
with  his  back  to  the  mantelpiece,  deciding,  very 
kindly,  on  the  merits  of  our  effusions.  And 
round  Oscar  Wilde,  not  then  under  a  cloud, 
hovered  reverently  Lionel  Johnson  and  Ernest 
80 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

Dowson,  with  others.  This  must  have  been  in 
1891,  and  I  marvelled  at  the  time  to  notice  the 
fascination  which  poor  Wilde  exercised  over 
the  otherwise  rational.  He  sat  as  it  were 
enthroned  and  surrounded  by  a  differential 
circle.1 

The  influence  of  Verlaine  and  the  symbolist 
poets  of  Paris  in  this  circle  was  profound. 
Every  one  had  a  passion  for  things  French. 
Symons  translated  the  prose  poems  of  Baude- 
laire and  the  verses  of  Mallarme,  Dowson 
is  inspired  by  the  '  Fetes  Gallantes,'  and  so  on. 
As  Mr.  Plarr  writes :  *  Stray  Gauls  used  to  be 
imported  to  grace  literary  circles  here.  I 
remember  one  such — a  rare  instance  of  a  rough 
Frenchman — to  whom  Dowson  was  devoted. 
When  a  Gaul  appeared  in  a  coterie  we  were 
either  silent,  like  the  schoolgirls  in  their  French 
conversation  hour,  or  we  talked  a  weird  un- 
French  French  like  the  ladies  in  some  of  Du 
Manner's  drawings.' l 

Of  course  it  must  not  be  supposed,  however, 
that    the   nineties   ever   remained   at   all   sta- 
tionary in  this  condition  or  entirely  under  these 
influences.     Mr.  Plarr  is  speaking  of  the  early 
nineties,  the  age  when  John  Gray's  Silverpoints 
was  perhaps  a  fair  sample  of  the  poetry  of  the 
1  Victor  Plarr,  Ernest  Dowson,  p.  23.     1914. 
81  G 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

moment  for  this  group ;  but,  when  at  the  same 
time  it  must  be  remembered,  poets  like  Francis 
Thompson  and  William  Watson  were  carrying 
on  the  staider  traditions  of  English  poetry 
altogether  unmoved  by  these  exotic  influences 
from  Montmartre  and  the  studios  of  the  south. 
The  nineties  group  itself  only  remained  for 
a  restive  moment  like  this  before  each  man  was 
to  go  his  own  way.  They  were  indeed  all  souls 
seeking  the  way  to  perfection  in  art.  Yeats 
went  off  to  assist  to  found  the  Irish  School ; 
Richard  Le  Gallienne  went  to  America ;  Gray 
became  a  priest.  Many  disappeared  shortly 
afterwards  from  the  lower  slopes  of  Parnassus, 
not  being  of  those  dowered  with  the  true  call ; 
and  so,  one  after  the  other,  all  are  to  be 
accounted  for.  The  genuine  men  of  the 
nineties  after  the  fall  of  Wilde  seem  to  have 
migrated  to  Smithers"1  wonderful  bookshop  in 
Bond  Street,  where  their  later  works  were  issued 
in  ornate  editions. 

The  names  of  others  besides  the  actual  mem- 
bers of  the  Rhymers'  Club  must  not  be  altoge- 
ther forgotten,  such  as  Percy  Hemingway  with 
his  Happy  Wanderer,  Theodore  Wratislaw, 
Olive  Custance,  Dollie  Radford,  Rosamund 
Marriott- Watson,  Norman  Gale,  and  many 
others  who  were  also  of  the  movement.  How- 
82 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

ever,  of  them  I  cannot  speak  here,  but  can  only 
refer  the  reader  to  the  book-lists  of  Elkin 
Mathews  and  John  Lane  for  the  first  period, 
and  of  Leonard  Smithers  for  the  second.  In 
the  numerous  slim  plaquettes  of  verse  issued 
from  these  presses  he  will  find  golden  verse 
worthy  of  the  labour  of  his  research.  Indeed, 
amid  so  many  writers  one  is  compelled  to  resort 
to  the  odious  necessity  of  a  choice,  so  I  shall 
here  all  too  briefly  deal  with  Silverpoints  as 
a  typical  volume  of  the  early  period,  and  then 
trace  succinctly  the  career  of  two  poets,  who 
had  certainly  the  right  to  that  appellation, 
Ernest  Dowson  and  John  Davidson,  and  who 
were  both  not  only  of,  but  actually  were  the 
movement  itself.  Lastly,  in  this  section,  as  an 
indication  of  the  wide  influence  these  writers 
had  overseas,  as  in  the  case  of  the  Birch  Bark 
School  of  Canada  and  certain  poets  in  Aus- 
tralia, I  wish  to  mention  the  young  American 
poet  who  was  an  intimate  of  so  many  of  the 
men  of  the  nineties — William  Theodore  Peters. 
The  narrow  green  octavo  of  Silverpointsy 
with  its  lambent  golden  flames,  strikes  the  eye 
at  once  as  some  bi/arre  and  exotic  work.  It 
was  one  of  the  first  of  the  limited  editions  de 
luxe  that  mark  the  new  printing  of  the  decade, 
and  is  one  of  the  most  dainty  little  books  ever 
issued  by  Elkin  Mathews  and  John  Lane. 
83 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

Most  of  the  titles  are  in  French,  and  there  are 
imitations  from  Charles  Baudelaire,  Arthur 
Rimbaud,  Stephane  Mallarme,  Paul  Verlaine 
— the  gods  of  the  symbolist  school  at  that 
moment.  Poems  are  dedicated  (it  was  the 
habit  of  the  decade)  to  friends,  including 
Pierre  Louys,  Paul  Verlaine,  Oscar  Wilde, 
R.  H.  Sherard,  Henri  Teixeira  de  Mattos, 
Ernest  Dowson,  etc.  The  predominant  note  is 
that  of  tigress's  blood  and  tiger-lilies.  Honey, 
roses,  white  breasts,  and  golden  hair,  with 
fierce  passion  and  indolent  languor,  are 
the  chords  of  the  book's  frisson.  All  the 
panoply  of  the  new  English  art  begotten  from 
the  French  here  burgeons  forth  with  the  Satanic 
note  that  was  then  in  the  fashion.  We  find 
this  in  the  Femmes  Damnfes  : 

Like  moody  beasts  they  lie  along  the  sands  ; 
Look  where  the  sky  against  the  sea-rim  clings : 
Foot  stretches  out  to  foot,  and  groping  hands 
Have  languors  soft  and  bitter  shudderings. 

Some  by  the  light  of  crumbling,  resinous  gums, 
In  the  still  hollows  of  old  pagan  dens, 
Call  chee  in  aid  to  their  deliriums 
O  Bacchus!  cajoler  of  ancient  pains. 

And  those  whose  breasts  for  scapulars  are  fain 
Nurse  under  their  long  robes  the  cruel  thong, 
These,   in  dim  woods,   where  huddling  shadows 

throng, 

Mix  with  the  foam  of  pleasure  tears  of  pain. 
84 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

There  is  more  than  an  echo  of  Rimbaud^s 
verses  in  this  volume,  and  the  poet  is  evidently 
straining  always  after  the  violent  effect,  the 
climacteric  moment  of  a  mood  or  passion.  Pro- 
bably two  of  the  most  successfully  carried 
through  crises  are  The  Barber  and  Mishka. 
The  first  of  these  as  a  typical  example  of  the 
whole  school  I  venture  to  spheterize  in  full : 

I  dreamed  I  was  a  barber  ;  and  there  went 
Beneath  my  hand,  oh  !  manes  extravagant. 
Beneath  my  trembling  fingers,  many  a  mask 
Of  many  a  pleasant  girl.     It  was  my  task 
To  gild  their  hair,  carefully,  strand  by  strand  ; 
To  paint  their  eyebrows  with  a  timid  hand  ; 
To  draw  a  bodkin,  from  a  vase  of  Kohl, 
Through  the  closed  lashes ;  pencils  from  a  bowl 
Of  sepia,  to  paint  them  underneath  ; 
To  blow  upon  their  eyes  with  a  soft  breath. 
They  lay  them   back   and  watched   the  leaping 
bands. 

The  dream  grew  vague,  I  moulded  with  my  hands 
The  mobile  breasts,  the  valley  ;   and  the  waist 
I  touched ;  and  pigments  reverently  placed 
Upon  their  thighs  in  sapient  spots  and  stains, 
Beryls  and  chrysolites  and  diaphanes, 
And  gems  whose  hot  harsh  names  are  never  said 
I  was  a  masseur ;    and  my  fingers  bled 
With  wonder  as  I  touched  their  awful  limbs. 

Suddenly,  in  the  marble  trough  there  seems 
O,  last  of  my  pale  mistresses,  sweetness ! 
85 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

A  twylipped  scarlet  pansie.     My  caress 
Tinges  thy  steel-grey  eyes  to  violet, 
Adown  thy  body  skips  the  pit-a-pat 
Of  treatment  once  heard  in  a  hospital 
For  plagues  that  fascinate,  but  half  appal. 

So,  at  the  sound,  the  blood  of  me  stood  cold ; 
Thy  chaste  hair  ripened  into  sullen  gold ; 
Thy  throat,  the  shoulders,  swelled  and  were  un- 
couth ; 

The  breasts  rose  up  and  offered   each  a  mouth ; 
And  on  the  belly,  pallid  blushes  crept, 
That  maddened  me,  until  I  laughed  and  wept. 

Here  we  have  a  long  amorous  catalogue.  It 
is  the  catalogue  age  which  comes  via  Oscar 
Wilde's  Sphinx  and  Salome  from  certain  French 
writers.  But  this  does  not  make  up  for  the 
singing  power  of  the  poet,  and  in  long  poems  it 
becomes  singularly  laborious.  However,  this 
phase  of  poetry  is  so  typical  of  the  age  that  it 
is  as  well  to  have  dealt  with  it  before  turning 
to  the  essentially  '  singing  '  poets  of  the  period, 
Dowson  and  Davidson. 

Indeed,  there  is  no  one  in  the  nineties 
worthier  of  the  honourable  title  of  poet  than 
Ernest  Dowson.  With  his  unsatisfied  passion 
for  Adelaide  in  Soho  ;  his  cry  for '  madder  music 
and  for  stronger  wine1;  his  aesthetic  theories, 
such  as  that  the  letter  '  v '  was  the  most 
86 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

beautiful  of  the  letters  ;  his  reverence  for  things 
French,  he  has  caused  Mr.  Symons,  in  one  of 
his  most  notable  essays,  to  draw  a  delightful 
portrait  of  a  true  enfant  de  Boheme.  Robert 
Harborough  Sherard  has  also  kept  the  Dowson 
tradition  up  in  his  description  of  the  death  of 
the  vexed  and  torn  spirit  of  the  poet  in  his 
Twenty  Years  in  Paris,  a  work  which  contains 
much  interesting  material  for  a  study  of  the 
nineties.  But  Victor  Plarr,  another  poet  of 
the  nineties,  enraged  at  the  incompleteness  of 
these  pictures,  has  tried  to  give  us  in  his  remi- 
niscences, unpublished  letters,  and  marginalia, 
the  other  facet  of  Dowson — the  poete  intime 
known  to  few. 

It  is  no  question  of  ours,  in  a  brief  sum- 
mary like  this,  which  is  the  truer  portrait  of 
Dowson ;  whether  he  was  or  was  not  like  Keats 
in  his  personal  appearance;  whether  Arthur 
Moore  and  Dowson  wrote  alternate  chapters 
of  A  Comedy  of  Masks ;  whether  in  his  last 
days  or  not  Leonard  Smithers  used  to  pay  him 
thirty  shillings  a  week  for  all  he  could  do  ; 
whether  he  used  to  pray  or  not  in  front  of  the 
bearded  Virgin  at  Arques ;  whether  he  used  to 
drink  hashish  or  not.  All  these  problems  are 
outside  the  beauty  of  the  lyric  poetry  of 
Dowson ;  and  it  is  by  his  poetry  and  not 
87 


THE   MEN  OF  THE  NINETIES 

because  of  all  these  rumours  around  his  brief 
life  that  he  will  live. 

He  was  the  poet  impressionist  of  momentary 
emotions,  and  poetry  with  him  was,  as  Stephane 
Mallarme  said,  'the  language  of  a  crisis.'  Each 
Dowson  poem  is  more  or  less  the  feverish  im- 
pression of  a  hectical  crisis.  For  in  a  way  he 
takes  off'  where  Keats  ended,  for  Keats  was 
becoming  a  hectic,  while  Dowson  started  out 
as  one. 

Exceeding  sorrow 

Consumeth  my  sad  heart ! 
Because  to-morrow 

We  must  part. 
Now  is  exceeding  sorrow 
All  my  part !  .  .  . 

Be  no  word  spoken ; 

Weep  nothing :  let  a  pale 
Silence,  unbroken 

Silence  prevail ! 
Prithee,  be  no  word  spoken, 

Lest  I  fail ! 

His  earliest  poem  to  attract  attention  was 
Amor  Umbratilis,  which  appeared  in  Home's 
Century  Guild  Hobby  Horse.  It  has  the  real 
Dowson  note,  and  marks  him  down  at  once  as 
one  of  those  poets  who  are  by  nature  buveurs 
de  lune.  That  was  in  1891.  In  1892  came 
out  the  first  book  of  the  Rhymers'  Club,  and 
88 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

with  six  poems  of  Dowson  in  it  he  definitely 
took  his  place  in  the  movement.  It  is  said 
that  the  Oscar  Wilde  set  sent  him  a  telegram 
shortly  after  this  'peremptorily  ordering  him 
to  appear  at  the  Cafe  Royal  to  lunch  with  the 
then  great  man.1  Dowson  was  flattered,  and 
might  well  be,  for  Wilde  was  a  splendid  judge 
of  good  work. 

Two  years  later  the  Club's  second  book  ap- 
peared, and  Dowson  has  again  half  a  dozen 
poems  in  it,  including  the  lovely  Extreme 
Unction,  and  that  rather  doubtfully  praised 
lyric  '  non  sum  qualis  erarn  bonae  sub  regno 
Cynarae."1  Then  in  the  same  year  as  The 
Savoy  (1896)  appeared  his  Verses,  printed  on 
Japanese  vellum  and  bound  in  parchment,  with 
a  cover  design  in  gold  by  Aubrey  Beardsley — 
a  typical  Smithers  book.  This  volume  con- 
tains the  best  of  Dowson,  the  handsel  (if  it  is 
not  too  big  a  phrase  to  use  of  such  a  delicate 
and  delightful  artist),  the  handsel  of  his  immor- 
tality. For  there  is  something  about  Dowson's 
best  work,  though  so  fragile  in  its  texture,  that 
has  the  classic  permanence  of  a  latter  -  day 
Propertius.  He  has  a  Latin  brevity  and  clarity, 
and  he  is  at  his  best  in  this  volume.  Some- 
thing has  vanished  from  the  enchantment  of 
the  singer  in  Decorations  (1899).  It  is  like  the 
89 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

flowers  of  the  night  before.  One  feels  that  so 
many  of  these  later  verses  had  been  done  per- 
force, as  Victor  Plan*  says,  rather  to  keep  on  in 
the  movement  lest  one  was  forgotten.  But  in 
1899  the  movement  was  moribund,  and  the 
winter  of  discontent  for  the  Pierrots  of  the 
nineties  was  fast  closing  down.  Remembering 
these  things,  one  murmurs  the  sad  beauty  of 
those  perfect  lines  of  this  true  poet  in  his  first 
volume : 

When  this,  our  rose,  is  faded, 

And  these,  our  days,  are  done, 
In  lands  profoundly  shaded 

From  tempest  and  from  sun : 
Ah,  once  more  come  together, 

Shall  we  forgive  the  past, 
And  safe  from  worldly  weather 

Possess  our  souls  at  last. 

Not  without  reason  one  feels  he  has  been 
called  the  '  rosa  rosarum  of  All  the  Nineties,1 
in  so  far  as  poetry  is  concerned ;  but,  per- 
sonally, I  would  prefer  to  call  him,  if  one  has 
to  call  such  a  true  poet  anything,  the  poets' 
poet  of  the  nineties.  The  best  of  his  short 
stories  rank  high  in  the  great  mass  of  the 
literature  of  those  days,  and  are  dealt  with  (to- 
gether with  his  partnership  in  two  novels)  in 
another  section.  As  for  his  little  one-act  play, 
90 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

The  Pierrot  of  the  Minute,  one  is  apt  to  feel 
perhaps  that  Beardsley  was  not  over  unjust  to 
it,  when  he  described  it  as  a  tiresome  playlet 
he  had  to  illustrate.  At  any  rate,  it  was  the 
cause  of  Beardsley "s  doing  one  or  two  admir- 
able decorations,  even  if  the  actual  play,  in 
which  the  young  American  poet  of  the  nineties, 
Theodore  Peters  (of  whom  more  anon),  and 
Beardsley's  own  sister  acted,  was  not  effective 
as  a  stage  production. 

There  is  no  doubt  but  that  Davidson,  though 
he  was  outside  the  coteries  of  the  nineties,  was 
still  of  them.  First  of  all  he  was  a  Scotchman 
of  evangelical  extraction,  and  secondly  he  was 
not  an  Oxford  man.  All  this  made  him  out- 
side the  group.  On  the  other  count,  he  was  of 
the  Rhymers1  Club,  though  he  did  not  con- 
tribute to  the  books.  He  was  strongly  in- 
fluenced by  Nietzsche,  though  the  French 
influence  in  him  was  rather  negative.  His 
books  came  from  the  Bodley  Head  and  were 
well  recognised  by  its  other  members.  Beardsley 
even  decorated  some  of  them,  and  Rothenstein 
did  his  portrait  for  The  Yellow  Book.  In  fact, 
Davidson  himself  wrote  for  that  periodical. 
All  this  made  him  of  the  group.  It  would  be 
thus  impossible  to  pass  over  such  a  poet  in  con- 
nection with  this  movement,  for  Davidson  has 
91 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

written  some  magnificent  lyrics,  if  he  has  made 
his  testaments  too  often  and  too  turgidly.  The 
Davidson,  indeed,  of  the  nineties  will  be  dis- 
covered to  be,  by  any  one  examining  his  works, 
the  Davidson  that  will  most  probably  survive. 

He  was  born  in  1857,  but  as  Mr.  Holbrook 
Jackson  admirably  puts  it,  '  John  Davidson 
did  not  show  any  distinctive  Jin  de  siecle 
characteristics  until  he  produced  his  novel 
Perfervid l  in  1890.'  His  next  work,  a  volume 
of  poetry,  which  was  the  first  to  attract  atten- 
tion, In  a  Music  Hall  and  other  Poems  (1891), 
accentuates  these  distinctive  characteristics, 
and  fairly  launches  him  on  the  tide  of  the 
movement.  Before  that  time  he  had  been 
school-mastering  and  clerking  in  Scotland, 
while  his  leisure  had  begotten  three  rather  ill- 
conceived  works.  Davidson  discovered  himself 
when  he  came  to  London  to  write.  The 
movement  of  the  nineties  stimulated  him  to- 
wards artistic  production,  and  when  that 
movement  was  killed  by  the  fall  of  Wilde,  and 
buried  by  the  Boer  War,  Davidson  again  lost 
himself  in  the  philosophic  propaganda  of  his 
last  years  before  he  was  driven  to  suicide. 
Philosophy,  indeed,  with  John  Davidson,  was 

1  The  Eighteen  Nineties,  by  Holbrook  Jackson,  p.  215 
1913. 

92 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

to  eat  one's  heart  with  resultant  mental  in- 
digestion that  completely  unbalanced  the 
artist  in  him.  Therefore,  so  far  as  this  ap- 
preciation is  concerned,  we  only  have  to  deal 
with  the  happy  Davidson  of  the  Ballads  and 
Fleet  Street  Eclogues  fame  ;  the  gay  writer  of 
A  Random  Itinerary  (1894)  ;  the  rather  hope- 
less novelist  of  Baptist  Lake  (1894),  and  The 
Wonderful  Mission  of  Earl  Lavender  (1895). 
The  last  tedious  phase  before  he  gave  himself 
to  the  Cornish  sea  is  no  affair  of  ours.  In  his 
Testament  he  says  '  none  should  outlive  his 
power,1  and  realising  probably  that  he  had  made 
this  mistake,  he  wished  to  end  it  all. 

But  in  the  nineties  he  was  like  his  own 
birds,  full  of  '  oboe '  song  and  '  broken  music.1 
Seldom  has  the  English  river,  the  Thames,  been 
more  sweetly  chaunted  than  by  him.  While 
if  we  are  looking  for  his  kinship  with  his  time 
there  is  no  doubt  about  it  in  The  Ballad  of  a 
Nun^  who  remarks : 

I  care  not  for  my  broken  vow, 

Though  God  should  come  in  thunder  soon, 
I  am  sister  to  the  mountains  now, 

And  sister  to  the  sun  and  moon. 

A  statement  which  we  feel  many  of  the 
Beardsley  ladies  cadaverous  with  sin  or  fat 
with  luxury  would  have  been  quite  capable  of 
repeating.  Again,  his  Thirty  Bob  a  Week  in 
93 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

The  Yellow  Book  is  as  much  a  ninety  effort  as  his 
Ballad  of  Hell,  while  his  novel,  Earl  Lavender, 
is  a  burlesque  of  certain  of  the  eccentricities 
of  the  period.  In  a  poetical  note  to  this 
volume  he  sings  : 

Oh  !  our  age  end  style  perplexes 
All  our  Elders'  time  has  famed  ; 
On  our  sleeves  we  wear  our  sexes, 
Our  diseases,  unashamed. 

The  prevalent  realistic  disease  in  poetry  is 
well  represented  by  A  Woman  and  her  Son : 

He  set  his  teeth,  and  saw  his  mother  die, 
Outside  a  city  reveller's  tipsy  tread 
Severed  the  silence  with  a  jagged  rent. 

Above  all,  Davidson  handles  with  marked 
facility  the  modern  ballad  medium  of  narra- 
tive verse.  The  Ballad  of  a  Nun,  The  Ballad 
of  an  Artist's  Wife,  and  others,  relate  their 
story  in  easy,  jogging  quatrains.  As  a  sample 
one  can  quote  from  A  New  Ballad  of  Tann- 
hduser : 

As  he  lay  worshipping  his  bride, 
While  rose  leaves  in  her  bosom  fell, 

On  dreams  came  sailing  on  a  tide 
Of  sleep,  he  heard  a  matin  bell. 

'  Hark  !  let  us  leave  the  magic  hill,' 
He  said,  'and  live  on  earth  with  men.' 

'No,  here,'  she  said,  '  we  stay  until 
The  Golden  Age  shall  come  again.' 
94 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

But  if  Davidson  could  tell  a  tale  in  verse 
it  cannot  be  said  he  understood  the  novel  form. 
Although  here  it  is  rather  noticeable  that  he 
has  a  strange,  unique  feature  among  his  con- 
temporaries. For  he  at  least  has  a  sense  of 
humour.  Max  Beerbohm,  it  is  true,  had  the 
gift  of  irony  ;  but  Davidson,  almost  alone,  has 
a  certain  vein  of  grim  Scotch  humour,  as,  for 
example,  in  the  character  of  little  red-headed 
Mortimer  in  Perfervid.  In  Dowson,  Johnson, 
Symons,  and  the  others,  one  is  sometimes 
appalled  by  the  seriousness  of  it  all.  Lastly, 
but  by  no  means  least.  Davidson  occasionally 
attains  the  lyric  rapture  of  unadulterated 
poetry  in  his  shorter  pieces,  while  his  vig- 
nettes of  nature  linger  in  the  memory  on 
account  of  their  truth  and  beauty.  Both 
these  qualities — the  lyric  rapture  and  the 
keen  eye  for  country  sights  and  sounds — 
are  to  be  found,  for  instance,  in  A  Runndble 
Stag : 

When  the  pods  went  pop  on  the  broom,  green 
broom, 

And  apples  began  to  be  golden-skinned, 
We  harboured  a  stag  in  the  Priory  coomb, 

And  we  feathered  his  trail  up  wind,  up  wind  1 

Among     many     other    ambitions,     Davidson 

wanted    to    fire    the     scientific     world     with 

95 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

imaginative  poetiy.  As  he  phrased  it :  '  Science 
is  still  a  valley  of  dead  bones  till  imagina- 
tion breathes  upon  it/  There  are  indeed 
evidences  of  an  almost  Shelleyan  pantheism 
in  his  credo.  Unhappy  was  his  life,  but, 
probably,  he  did  not  labour  in  vain,  for  a 
handsel  of  his  song  will  endure.  Writing,  in- 
deed, was  the  consolation  of  his  life : 

I  cannot  write,  I  cannot  think  ; 
'Tis  half  delight  and  half  distress  ; 
My  memory  stumbles  on  the  brink 
Of  some  unfathomed  happiness — 

Of  some  old  happiness  divine, 
What  haunting  scent,  what  haunting  note, 
What  word,  or  what  melodious  line, 
Sends  my  heart  throbbing  to  my  throat  ? 

Indeed,  why  repeat  it,  both  Dowson  and  he 
will  live  by  their  poetry.  But  in  the  case  of 
Davidson,  in  addition,  there  is  his  rather 
elephantine  humour.  While  again  it  must 
always  be  remembered  that  he  had  the  courage 
to  state  that  the  fear  of  speaking  freely  had 
'  cramped  the  literature  of  England  for  a 
century.1  It  was  the  liberty  of  the  French 
literature  indeed  that  in  no  small  degree 
captivated  the  minds  of  all  these  young  men. 
Very  few  of  them,  however,  had  the  courage  to 
96 


speak  freely.  But  it  must  always  remain  to 
Davidson's  credit  that  he  tried  to  write  a  freer, 
emancipated  novel,  which,  however,  he  failed 
to  do,  because  he  had  a  very  remote  idea  of 
novel  construction. 

It  was  in  1896  that  the  quaint  little  salmon- 
pink  volume  of  William  Theodore  Peters,  the 
young  American  poet,  appeared,  entitled  Posies 
out  of  Rings.  This  young  American  was  an 
intimate  of  some  of  the  men  of  the  nineties, 
and  though  it  is  doubtful  whether  he  himself 
would  have  ever  achieved  high  fame  as  a  poet, 
he  had  a  sincere  love  for  the  beautiful  things 
of  Art.  Among  all  these  tragedies  of  ill- 
health,  insanity  and  suicide  that  seemed  to 
track  down  each  of  these  young  men,  his  fate 
was  perhaps  the  saddest  of  all,  for  he  died  of 
starvation  in  Paris,1  where  many  of  his  verses 
had  appeared  in  a  distinctly  American  venture, 
The  Quartier  Latin.  His  volume  of  conceits 
are  a  harking  back,  not  always  satisfactorily,  to 
the  ancient  form  of  the  versified  epigram. 
What  was  wrong  with  his  Muse  is  that  it  was 
only  half  alive.  He  puts  indeed  his  own  case 
in  a  nutshell  in  that  charming  little  poem 
Pierrot  and  the  Statue,  which  I  venture  to 
quote  in  full : 

1  R.  H.  Sherard,  Twenty  Years  in  Paris. 

97  H 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

One  summer  evening  in  a  charmed  wood, 
Before  a  marble  Venus,  Pierrot  stood  ; 
A  Venus  beautiful  beyond  compare, 
Gracious  her  lip,  her  snowy  bosom  bare, 
Pierrot  amorous,  his  cheeks  aflame, 
Called  the  white  statue  many  a  lover's  name. 
An  oriole  flew  down  from  off  a  tree, 
•  Woo  not  a  goddess  made  of  stone  ! '  sang  he. 
'  All  of  my  warmth  to  warm  it,'  Pierrot  said, 
When  by  the  pedestal  he  sank  down  dead  ; 
The  statue  faintly  flushed,  it  seemed  to  strive 
To  move — but  it  was  only  half  alive. 

Such  was  the  Muse's  response  to  Peters1  wooing ; 
while  he,  in  that  strange  bohemian  world  of  so 
many  of  the  young  writers  of  that  day,  wrote  in 
another  short  poem  the  epitaph  of  the  majority 
of  those  who  gave  so  recklessly  of  their  youth, 
only  to  fail.  It  is  called  To  the  Caft  aux 
Phares  de  TOuest,  Quartier  Montparnasse  : 

The  painted  ship  in  the  paste-board  sea 

Sails  night  and  day. 
To-morrow  it  will  be  as  far  as  it  was  yesterday. 

But  underneath,  in  the  Cafe", 

The  lusty  crafts  go  down, 
And  one  by  one,  poor  mad  souls  drown — 
While  the  painted  ship  in  the  paste-board  sea 

Sails  night  and  day. 

Such,  indeed,  was  too  often  the   fate  of  the 

epigoni  of  the  movement.     Their  nightingales 

98 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

were  never  heard ;   they  were  buried  with  all 
their  songs  still  unsung. 

The  only  other  volume  which  Theodore 
Peters  essayed,  to  my  knowledge,  was  a  little 
poetic  one-acter  like  his  friend  Ernest  Dowson's 
Pierrot  of  the  Minute  (for  which  work  he  wrote 
an  epilogue).  Peters1  play,  entitled  The  Tourna- 
ment of  Love,  is  a  very  scarce  item  of  the  nine- 
ties' bibliography.  He  calls  it  a  pastoral  masque 
in  one  act,  and  it  was  published  by  Brentano's 
at  Paris  in  1894  and  illustrated  with  drawings 
by  Alfred  Jones.  As  Bantock  wrote  the  music 
for  The  Pierrot  of  the  Minute,  Noel  Johnson 
composed  the  melodies  for  The  Tournament  of 
Love.  The  masque  was  put  on  at  the  Theatre 
d'Application  (La  Bodiniere),  18  rue  St.  Lazare, 
May  8,  1894.  Peters  himself  took  the  part  of 
Bertrand  de  Roaix,  a  troubadour,  while  among 
the  cast  were  Wynford  Dewhurst,  the  painter, 
and  Lo'ie  Fuller,  the  dancer.  The  scene  is  an 
almond  orchard  on  the  outskirts  of  Toulouse, 
on  the  afternoon  of  the  3rd  May,  1498.  '  A 
group  of  troubadours  discovered  at  the  right  of 
the  stage,  seated  upon  a  white  semicircular 
Renaissance  bench,  some  tuning  their  instru- 
ments. Other  poets  towards  the  back.  A 
laurel  tree  at  the  right  centre.  On  the  left 
centre  two  heralds  guard  the  entrance  to  the 
99 


THE  MEN  OF  THE  NINETIES 

lists.1  Pons  d'Orange,  the  arrived  poet,  will 
win  at  this  tournament  of  love,  the  Eglantine 
nouvelle,  *  that  golden  prize  of  wit.'  But  it  is 
won  by  Bertrand  de  Roaix,  who  wants  it  not, 
but  the  love  of  the  institutress  of  this  court  of 
love,  *  Clemence  Isaure,  the  Primrose  Queen  of 
Beauty.1  At  his  love  protestations  she  laughs ; 
the  troubadour  goes  outside  the  lists  and  stabs 
himself.  As  he  lies  dying  Clemence,  clothed 
in  her  white  samite,  powdered  with  silver  fleur- 
de-lys  and  edged  with  ermine,  her  dust-blonde 
hair  bound  with  a  fillet  of  oak-leaves,  comes 
forth  from  the  lists  and  finds  her  boy  lover's 
body: 

Love  came  and  went ;  we 
Knew  him  not.     I  have  found  my  soul  too  late. 


JOO 


THE  Victorian  literary  era  was  fecund  in 
essayists,  and  the  last  decade  lived  up  to  this 
reputation.  The  forerunners  of  the  essayists 
of  the  nineties  were  obviously  Walter  Pater, 
John  Addington  Symonds,  Oscar  Wilde  with 
his  Intentions  and  Whistler  in  his  Gentle  Art. 
Behind  these  there  was  a  great  mass  of  French 
influence  which,  together  with  literary  im- 
pressionism as  exemplified  in  such  books  as 
Crackanthorpe's  Vignettes,  was  to  give  the 
essay  and  the  so-called  study  a  new  lease  of 
life.  Indeed,  what  came  out  of  the  period 
was  not  merely  criticism  as  a  useful  broom 
sweeping  away  the  chaff  from  the  wheat,  but 
criticism  itself  as  a  creative  art,  as  Wilde 
chose  to  call  it ;  not  merely  dry -as -dust 
records  of  plays  and  cities,  and  other  affairs  as 
in  guide  manuals,  but  artistic  impressions,  in 
some  ways  as  vital  as  the  objects  themselves. 
Mr.  Arthur  Symons,  in  particular,  has  given 
us  an  abundance  of  this  kind  of  work  of 
which  I  have  already  spoken.  So  did  Lionel 
101 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

Johnson  and  Mr.  Max  Beerbohm,  to  whom 
I  propose  to  allude  here,  and  many  others  like 
Mr.  Bernard  Shaw,  who,  though  not  of  the 
movement,  moved  alongside  it  on  his  own  way, 
and  Mr.  G.  S.  Street,  in  his  Episodes,  Richard 
Le  Gallienne,  Arthur  Galton,  Francis  Adams 
in  his  Essays  In  Modernity^  etc.  etc.  One  has 
only  to  turn  over  the  magazines  of  the  period 
to  find  a  band  of  writers,  too  numerous  to 
mention,  who  aided  on  the  movement  with 
their  pens.  To  cite  one  prominent  example 
alone,  there  was  Grant  Allen  with  his  essay 
oh  The  New  Hedonism.  Here,  however,  I 
must  be  content  with  a  brief  appreciative 
glance  at  the  works  of  the  two  writers  I  have 
mentioned,  who  were  both  actually  of  and  in 
the  movement  itself.  I  have  not  here  of  set 
purpose  referred  to  the  Henley  essayists  like 
Charles  Whibley.  But  the  two  men  of  the 
nineties  I  have  chosen  to  speak  of  here  have 
been  selected  in  the  way  an  essayist  should  be 
selected  nine  times  out  of  ten,  that  is  to  say, 
because  of  his  pleasing  personality.  These  two 
writers — particularly  Max — are  such  individual 
writers,  yet  they  never  offend.  They  are  just 
pleasant  garrulous  companions. 

For  those  who  care  at   all  passionately  for 
the   precious  things  of  literature,  the  work  of 
102 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

Lionel  Johnson  will  always  remain  a  cherished 
and  secluded  nook.  The  man  was  a  scholar, 
a  poet,  and  a  critic,  whose  dominant  note  was 
gracile  lucidity.  A  friend  writing  of  his  per- 
sonal appearance  at  the  time  of  his  death 
said,  'Thin,  pale,  very  delicate  he  looked, 
with  a  twitching  of  the  facial  muscles,  which 
showed  even  at  the  age  of  twenty-four  how 
unfit  was  his  physique  to  support  the  strain  of 
an  abnormally  nervous  organization.  Quick 
and  mouselike  in  his  movements,  reticent  of 
speech  and  low-voiced,  he  looked  like  some 
old-fashioned  child  who  had  strayed  by  chance 
into  an  assembly  of  men.  But  a  child  could 
not  have  shown  that  inward  smile  of  appre- 
ciative humour,  a  little  aloof,  a  little  con- 
temptuous perhaps,  that  worked  constantly 
around  his  mouth.  He  never  changed  except 
in  the  direction  of  a  greater  pallor  and  a 
greater  fragility.' 

Cloistral  mysticism  was  the  key-chord  of  his 
two  volumes  of  poetry  (1895  and  1897).  In 
some  respects  he  seems  to  have  strayed  out 
of  the  seventeenth  century  of  Crashaw  and 
Herbert.  His  early  training,  no  doubt,  en- 
gendered this  aspect.  After  six  years  in  the 
grey  Gothic  school  of  Winchester  he  passed  on 
to  New  College,  Oxford.  Here  he  came  under 
103 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

the  influence  of  Pater,  and  was  charmed  by 
the  latter's  then  somewhat  hieratic  austerity. 
A  devout  Irish  Catholic,  he  was  moved  by 
three  themes  :  his  old  school,  Oxford,  and  Ire- 
land, and  to  these  he  unfortunately  too  often 
devoted  his  muse.  After  the  quiet  seclusion 
of  his  Oxford  years,  on  entering  the  vortex  of 
London  literary  life  he  found  that  the  world 
of  wayfaring  was  a  somewhat  rough  passage  in 
the  mire  for  one  so  delicate.  Out  of  the 
struggle  between  his  scholarly  aspirations  and 
the  cry  of  his  time  for  life,  more  life,  was 
woven  perhaps  the  finest  of  all  his  poems,  The 
Dark  Angel: 

Dark  angel,  with  thine  aching  lust 
To  rid  the  world  of  penitence  : 
Malicious  angel,  who  still  dost 
My  soul  such  subtile  violence  ! — 

Because  of  thee,  the  land  of  dreams 
Becomes  a  gathering  place  of  fears  : 
Until  tormented  slumber  seems 
One  vehemence  of  useless  tears  .  .  . 

Thou  art  the  whisper  in  the  gloom, 
The  hinting  tone,  the  haunting  laugh  : 
Thou  art  the  adorner  of  my  tomb, 
The  minstrel  of  mine  epitaph. 

Most    of    his    poems  are  subjective,  and  the 

majority  have  a  certain  stiffness  of  movement 

of  a   priest   laden   with  chasuble ;    but    some- 

104 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

times,  however,  as  in  Mystic  and  Cavalier, 
or  in  the  lines  on  the  statue  of  Charles  I 
at  Charing  Cross,  he  writes  with  a  winsome 
charm  and  freedom  of  spirit : 

Armoured  he  rides,  his  head 
Bare  to  the  stars  of  doom  : 
He  triumphs  now,  the  dead 
Beholding  London's  gloom  .  .  . 

Surely  this  poem  has  the  proud  note  of 
Henley !  There  is  another  trait  in  his  verse, 
which,  in  view  of  his  essays,  it  is  as  well  not 
to  pass  over.  Like  William  Watson,  his 
literary  poems  are  pregnant  with  phrases  of 
rich  criticism.  He  calls  back  the  immortals 
in  a  true  bookman's  invocation  hailing  'opu- 
lent Pindar,1  'the  pure  and  perfect  voice  of 
Gray,"1  '  pleasant  and  elegant  and  garrulous 
Pliny': 

Herodotus,  all  simple  and  all  wise  ; 
Demosthenes,  a  lightning  flame  of  seorn  : 
The  surge  of  Cicero,  that  never  dies  ; 
And  Homer,  grand  against  the  ancient  morn. 

But  we  are  here  chiefly  concerned  with  his 
prose  writings.  If  it  is  the  duty  of  the 
essayist  to  mirror  the  intellectuality  of  his 
age,  Lionel  Johnson  was  a  mirror  for  the 
Oxford  standpoint  of  the  nineties.  There 
105 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

still  remain  many  of  his  papers  uncollected 
in  various  old  newspaper  files.  But  certainly 
the  best  of  his  work  has  been  lovingly  collected 
by  friendly  hands,  and  worthily  housed  in 
Post  Liminium.  Take,  for  instance,  this 
passage  from  an  essay  on  books  published 
originally  in  The  Academy  (December  8th, 
1900): 

The  glowing  of  my  companionable  fire  upon 
the  backs  of  my  companionable  books,  and  then 
the  familiar  difficulty  of  choice.  Compassed 
about  by  old  friends,  whose  virtues  and  vices 
I  know  better  than  my  own,  I  will  be  loyal  to 
loves  that  are  not  of  yesterday.  New  poems, 
new  essays,  new  stories,  new  lives,  are  not  my 
company  at  Christmastide,  but  the  never-ageing 
old.  '  My  days  among  the  dead  are  passed.' 
Veracious  Sonthey,  how  cruel  a  lie  !  My  sole 
days  among  the  dead  are  the  days  passed  among 
the  still-born  or  moribund  moderns,  not  the  white 
days  and  shining  nights  free  for  the  strong  voices 
of  the  ancients  in  fame.  A  classic  has  a  perma- 
nence of  pleasurability  ;  that  is  the  meaning  of 
his  estate  and  title. 

Or  again,  Johnson  in  his  paper  on  The 
Work  of  Mr.  Pater,  sets  forth  perhaps  the 
best  appreciation  of  his  master  that  has  yet 
appeared : 

4  Magica  sympathise !  '  words  borne  upon  the 
shield  of  Lord  Herbert  of  Cherbury,  are  inscribed 

106 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

upon  the  writings  of  Mr.  Pater,  who  found  his 
way  straight  from  the  first  to  those  matters 
proper  to  his  genius,  nor  did  he,  as  Fuseli  says  of 
Leonardo,  '  waste  life,  insatiate  in  experiment.' 
.  .  .  'Nemo  perfectus  est,'  says  St.  Bernard,  'qui 
perfectior  esse  appetit ' :  it  is  as  true  in  art  as  in 
religion.  In  art  also  '  the  way  to  perfection  is 
through  a  series  of  disgusts '  .  .  .  and  truly,  as 
Joubert  said,  we  should  hesitate  before  we  differ 
in  religion  from  the  saints,  in  poetry  from  the 
poets.  .  .  .  There  is  no  languorous  toying  with 
things  of  beauty,  in  a  kind  of  opiate  dream,  to  be 
found  here. 

While  Symons  has  written  on  all  the  arts, 
the  sphere  of  Johnson  has  been  more  limited  to 
traditional  English  lines.  Johnson  attempts 
no  broad  assthetical  system  like  the  former. 
All  that  he  does  is  to  illuminate  the  writer 
of  whom  he  is  speaking.  And  his  little  essays, 
eminent  in  their  un-English  lucidity,  their 
scrupulous  nicety,  their  conscious  and  deli- 
berate beauty,  adding  to  our  belles  lettres  a 
classical  execution  and  finish  (which  perfection 
accounts  perhaps,  for  the  classical  smallness  of 
his  bookmaking)  have  all  the  bewildering 
charm  of  a  born  stylist.  Certain  of  his 
phrases  linger  in  the  mind  like  music.  '  Many 
a  sad  half-murmured  thought  of  Pascal,  many 
a  deep  and  plangent  utterance  of  Lucretius."1 
Or  the  line  :  '  The  face  whose  changes  domi- 
107 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

nate  my  heart.'  Like  the  styles  of  Newman 
and  Pater,  on  which  his  own  is  founded,  he 
is  singularly  allusive.  He  cites  critics  by 
chapter  and  verse  like  an  advocate  defending 
a  case.  In  fact,  as  in  his  critical  magnum 
opus.  The  Art  of  Thomas  Hardy,  he  is 
amazingly  judicial.  It  is,  too,  since  he  is 
essentially  academic,  to  the  older  critics  he 
prefers  to  turn  for  guidance.  As  he  writes : 
'  Flaubert  and  Baudelaire  and  Gautier,  Henne- 
quin  and  M.  Zola  and  M.  Mallarme\  with  all 
their  colleagues  or  exponents,  may  sometimes 
be  set  aside,  and  suffer  us  to  hear  Quintilian 
or  Ben  Jonson,  Cicero  or  Dryden/  This  habit 
sometimes  makes  him  strenuous  reading,  parti- 
cularly in  longer  criticisms  like  The  Art  of 
Thomas  Hardy. 

We  grow  weary  of  all  this  quotative  authority. 
Burton's  Anatomy  of  Melancholy  cannot  be 
brought  into  every-day  literary  criticism.  We 
want  to  hear  more  of  Lionel  Johnson's  own 
direct  opinions  and  less  of  these  selected  passages 
from  his  library.  So  it  is  to  those  passages 
where  Johnson  is  most  himself  we  turn  in 
The  Art  of  Thomas  Hardy,  which,  in  spite  of 
its  academicism  and  the  youthfulness  of  its 
author,  remains  a  genuine  piece  of  sound 
critical  work.  The  delightful  imagery  of  the 
108 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

prose  in  such  passages  is  often  very  illuminating, 
as  in  this  paragraph  : 

From  long  and  frequent  converse  with  works  of 
any  favourite  author,  we  often  grow  to  thinking 
of  them  under  some  symbol  or  image  ;  to  see  them 
summed  up  and  expressed  in  some  one  composite 
scene  of  our  own  making  ;  this  is  my  '  vision  '  of 
Mr.  Hardy's  works.  A  rolling  down  country, 
crossed  by  a  Roman  road  ;  here  a  gray  standing 
stone,  of  what  sacrificial  ritual  origin  I  can  but 
guess ;  there  a  grassy  barrow,  with  its  great 
bones,  its  red-brown  jars,  its  rude  gold  ornament, 
still  safe  in  earth  ;  a  broad  sky  burning  with  stars  ; 
a  solitary  man.  It  is  of  no  use  to  turn  away,  and 
to  think  of  the  village  farms  and  cottages,  with 
their  antique  ways  and  looks  ;  of  the  deep  woods, 
of  the  fall  of  the  woodman's  axe,  the  stir  of  the 
wind  in  the  branches  ;  of  the  rustic  feasts  and  fes- 
tivals, when  the  home-brewed  drink  goes  round, 
to  the  loosening  of  tongues  and  wits ;  of  the  hot 
meadows,  fragrant  hayfields,  cool  dairies,  and 
blazing  gardens  ;  of  shining  cart-horses  under  the 
chestnut- trees  and  cows  called  in  at  milking  time  : 
they  are  characteristic  scenes,  but  not  the  one 
characteristic  scene.  That  is  the  great  down  by 
night,  with  its  dead  in  their  ancient  graves,  and  its 
lonely  living  figure  ;  .  .  . 

There  is,  perhaps,  a  reek  about  it  all  of  a 

too-conscious    imitation   of  Pater's   murmured 

obituaries  which  makes  one  in  the  end  rather 

tired  of  this  hieratic  treatment  of  art,  so  that 

109 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

one  turns  rather  gladly  to  the  one  or  two 
tales  he  wrote.  For  example  in  The  Lilies  of 
France,  an  episode  of  French  anti-clericalism, 
which  appeared  in  The  Pageant,  1897,  he 
slowly  builds  up  a  thing  of  verbal  beauty 
that  one  feels  was  actually  worthy  of  him, 
while  in  the  previous  number  of  the  same 
quarterly  he  perpetrated  a  delightful  ironism  on 
the  literary  men  of  his  period  entitled  Incurable, 
in  which,  perhaps,  we  may  trace  faint  autobio- 
graphical clues.  Such,  briefly,  was  the  work  of 
this  young  man  who  was  found  dead  in  Fleet 
Street  early  one  morning,  aged  thirty-five. 

But  the  writer  who  was  to  bring  irony  in 
English  literature  to  a  consummate  pitch,  and 
add  to  the  age  a  strange  brief  brilliance  of 
his  own  wilful  spirit,  was  Max  Beerbohm.  Max, 
the  '  Incomparable '  as  Bernard  Shaw  once 
described  him,  is  the  charm  of  the  gilded  lily, 
the  fairy  prince  of  an  urbane  artificiality  :  he  is 
in  literature  what  the  cocktail  is  among  drinks  ; 
he  is  the  enemy  of  dullness  and  the  friend  of  that 
Greek  quality  called  '  charis.'  He  is  the  public 
school  and  Varsity  man  who  is  fond  of,  but 
afraid  of,  being  tedious  in  literature ;  so  with 
delightful  affectation  his  vehicle  is  persiflage 
with  a  load  of  wit  he  pretends  to  disdain. 
Of  all  the  prose  writers  of  the  Beardsley 
110 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

period  he  is  the  easiest  and  most  charming 
to  read.  In  fact,  he  is  the  ideal  essayist. 
He  titillates  the  literary  sense.  Fortunately 
his  glass  is  small,  for  if  one  had  to  drink  it  in 
quart  pots  the  result  would  be  as  disastrous  as 
in  his  one  and  only  mistake — the  long  novel 
Zuleilca  Dobson,  which  is  a  late  work  written 
long  after  the  nineties  had  been  swallowed  up 
by  that  maw  which  swallowed  up  Lesbians 
sparrow  and  all  other  beautiful  dead  things. 

Max  said  in  jest,  '  I  belong  to  the  Beardsley 
period,'  and  it  is  one  of  those  jests  which  is  only 
too  painfully  true.  When  he  was  at  Oxford  he  was 
caught  up  in  the  movement,  and  wrote,  under 
Wilde's  influence,  A  Defence  of  Cosmetics  for 
the  first  number  of  The  Yellow  Book,  and  he 
also  appeared  in  Lord  Alfred  Douglas's  maga- 
zine. Thenceforward  he  contributed  to  various 
quarterlies,  while  in  1896  the  little  red  volume 
with  its  white  paper  label  appeared  as  The 
Works,  containing  all  the  best  of  this  preco- 
cious enfant  terrible  of  literature,  who  assures 
us  that  he  read  in  bed,  while  at  school,  Marius 
the  Epicurean,  and  found  it  not  nearly  so  diffi- 
cult as  Midshipman  Easy.  At  the  age  of 
twenty-five  he  cries :  '  I  shall  write  no  more. 
Already  I  feel  myself  to  be  a  trifle  outmoded,' 
and  he  religiously  does  not  keep  his  word.  He 
111 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

keeps  pouring  out  caricatures,  writes  More^  the 
companion  volume  to  The  Works,  and  perpe- 
trates his  short  story  The  Happy  Hypocrite. 
Beyond  1899  we  cannot  follow  him,  but  he  has 
been  busy  ever  since  with  his  parodies,  his  Yet 
Again,  his  lamentable  novel,  his  one-act  play, 
and  so  on. 

It  is  to  that  Beardsley  period  to  which  he 
said  he  belonged  we  are  here  restricted.  And 
it  must  be  admitted  that  though  the  Boer  War 
and  the  Great  War  do  not  seem  to  have  gagged 
him,  there  is  something  so  impishly  impudent 
in  his  earlier  work  which  renders  it  more  re- 
markable than  the  complacent  efforts  of  his 
later  years. 

Amid  the  searching  seriousness  of  the 
nineties,  Max  is  like  balm  in  Gilead.  He 
has  the  infinite  blessing  of  irony.  The  others, 
except  Beardsley  (who  too  has  this  gift),  are  so 
appallingly  serious.  The  French  influences 
that  went  to  their  making  seem  to  have  killed 
the  valiant  English  humour  of  Falstaff,  Pickwick, 
and  Verdant  Green.  They  are  all  like  young 
priests  who  will  take  no  liberty  with  their 
ritual ;  but  Max  saves  the  period  with  his 
whimsical  irony.  His  is  not  the  fearful,  mor- 
dant irony  of  Octave  Mirbeau,  but  a  dainty 
butterflv  fancy  playing  lightly  over  the 
112 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

pleasures  of  a  pleasant  life.  To  be  essentially 
civilised  is  to  be  like  a  god.  This  is  the  pose 
of  such  a  mentality.  It  is  a  winsome  pose 
with  no  sharp  edges  to  it,  just  as  the  poseur 
himself  must  be  wilfully  blind  to  all  the 
seaminess  of  life.  In  front  of  his  window  (if 
a  temperament  be  a  window  looking  out  on 
life)  there  is  a  pleasant  garden.  Beyond  is  the 
noise  and  dust  of  the  highway.  He  is  the 
dandy  in  his  choice  of  life  as  in  his  choice  of 
literature,  and  in  more  than  one  sense  he  has 
written  the  happiest  essays  of  the  period. 

It  has  been  said  his  caricatures  are  essays. 
May  we  not  equally  say  his  essays  are  cari- 
catures ?  The  essay,  indeed,  is  the  work  of  the 
feline  male,  the  man  who  sits  beside  the  fire 
like  Charles  Lamb.  The  out-of-doors  man 
writes  the  episode.  But  Max  is  essentially  an 
indoors  man,  who  has  a  perfect  little  dressing- 
room  like  a  lady's  boudoir,  but  much  neater, 
where  he  concocts  his  essays  we  read  so  easily 
by  infinite  labour,  with  a  jewelled  pen.  It  is 
as  though  he  had  said :  *  Literature  must  either 
be  amusing  or  dull ;  mine  shall  be  the  former.' 
He  is  very  much  the  young  man  about  town 
who  has  consented  gracefully  to  come  and  charm 
us.  What  he  wrote  of  Whistler  in  The  Gentle 
Art  of  Making  Enemies,  we  may  say  of  him  : 
118  i 


'  His  style  never  falters.  The  silhouette  of  no 
sentence  is  ever  blurred.  Every  sentence  is 
ringing  with  a  clear,  vocal  cadence.'  And  the 
refrain  is  Max  himself  all  the  time,  and  his 
personality  is  so  likeable  we  stomach  it  all  the 
time.  It  is  the  note  that  vibrates  through  all 
his  amiable  satiric  irony,  whether  it  be  on  the 
House  of  Commons  Manner  or  in  defence  of 
the  use  of  Cosmetics,  or  in  describing  the  period 
of  1880.  Everything,  from  first  to  last,  is  done 
with  such  good  taste.  Even  in  his  wildest 
flights  of  raillery  he  is  utterly  purposed  not  to 
offend.  In  his  charming  paper,  1880,  he  has 
given  us  a  vigorous  vignette  of  the  previous 
decade  to  The  Yellow  Book  age.  One  can 
hardly  help  quoting  a  small  passage  here  from 
this  admirably  worked  up  prose :  '  In  fact 
Beauty  had  existed  long  before  1880.  It  was 
Mr.  Oscar  Wilde  who  managed  her  debut.  To 
study  the  period  is  to  admit  that  to  him  was 
due  no  small  part  of  the  social  vogue  that 
Beauty  began  to  enjoy.  Fired  by  his  fervid 
words,  men  and  women  hurled  their  mahogany 
into  the  streets  and  ransacked  the  curio-shops 
for  the  furniture  of  Annish  days.  Dadoes 
arose  upon  every  wall,  sunflowers  and  the 
feathers  of  peacocks  curved  in  every  corner, 
tea  grew  quite  cold  while  the  guests  were 
114 


praising  the  Willow  Pattern  of  its  cup.  A 
few  fashionable  women  even  dressed  themselves 
in  sinuous  draperies  and  unheard-of  greens. 
Into  whatsoever  ball-room  you  went,  you  would 
surely  find,  among  the  women  in  tiaras,  and 
the  fops  and  the  distinguished  foreigners,  half 
a  score  of  comely  ragamuffins  in  velveteen, 
murmuring  sonnets,  posturing,  waving  their 
hands.  Beauty  was  sought  in  the  most  un- 
likely places.  Young  painters  found  her 
mobbled  in  the  fogs,  and  bank-clerks  versed 
in  the  writings  of  Mr.  Hamerton,  were  heard 
to  declare,  as  they  sped  home  from  the  city, 
that  the  Underground  Railway  was  beau- 
tiful from  London  Bridge  to  Westminster, 
but  not  from  Sloane  Square  to  Netting  Hill 
Gate.1 

It  is  thus  that  Max  can  play  with  a  chord  of 
almost  tender  irony  on  his  subject,  and  such  a 
style,  so  full  of  the  writer's  personality,  has  the 
cachet  of  the  veritable  essayist.  How  charm- 
ingly, for  example,  he  records  his  reminiscences 
of  Beardsley.  It  is  a  delightful  little  picture 
of  the  artist,  interesting  enough  to  place  beside 
Arthur  Symons's  portrait :  '  He  loved  dining 
out,  and,  in  fact,  gaiety  of  any  kind.  His 
restlessness  was,  I  suppose,  one  of  the  symptoms 
of  his  malady.  He  was  always  most  content 
115 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

where  there  was  the  greatest  noise  and  bustle, 
the  largest  number  of  people,  and  the  most 
brilliant  light.  The  "domino-room""  at  the 
Cafe  Royal  had  always  a  great  fascination  for 
him  :  he  liked  the  mirrors  and  the  florid  gild- 
ing, the  little  parties  of  foreigners,  and  the 
smoke  and  the  clatter  of  the  dominoes  being 
shuffled  on  the  marble  tables.  ...  I  remember, 
also,  very  clearly,  a  supper  at  which  Beardsley 
was  present.  After  the  supper  we  sat  up  rather 
late.  He  was  the  life  and  soul  of  the  party, 
till,  quite  suddenly  almost  in  the  middle  of  a 
sentence,  he  fell  fast  asleep  in  his  chair.  He 
had  overstrained  his  vitality,  and  it  had  all  left 
him.  I  can  see  him  now  as  he  sat  there  with 
his  head  sunk  on  his  breast ;  the  thin  face, 
white  as  the  gardenia  in  his  coat,  and  the  pro- 
minent, harshly- cut  features ;  the  hair,  that 
always  covered  his  whole  forehead  in  a  fringe 
and  was  of  so  curious  a  colour — a  kind  of 
tortoise-shell ;  the  narrow,  angular  figure, 
and  the  long  hands  that  were  so  full  of 
power.1 1 

Outside  this  medium  of  the  essay,  with  the 
exception  of  the  caricatures,  Max  is  no  longer 
the  incomparable,  for  his  short  story,  The 
Happy  Hypocrite,  is  not  a  short  story  at  all, 

i  The  Idler,  May,  1898. 

116 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

but  a  spoilt  essay;1  while  his  novel  is  not 
merely  a  failure,  but  a  veritable  disaster.  With 
his  first  paper  in  The  Yellow  Book  he  fell  in 
with  the  step  of  the  men  of  the  nineties,  and 
he  too  became  a  part  of  their  efflorescence. 
Sufficient  unto  that  time  is  his  work,  and  with 
a  final  quotation  from  this  early  paper  so  re- 
dolent of  the  movement  that  there  is  no 
mistaking  it,  we  must  leave  him  and  his  future 
on  the  knees  of  the  gods :  '  Was  it  not  at 
Capua  that  they  had  a  whole  street  where 
nothing  was  sold  but  dyes  and  unguents  ?  We 
must  have  such  a  street,  and,  to  fill  our  new 
Seplosia,  our  Arcade  of  Unguents,  all  herbs 
and  minerals  and  live  creatures  shall  give  of 
their  substance.  The  white  cliffs  of  Albion 
shall  be  ground  to  powder  for  Loveliness,  and 
perfumed  by  the  ghost  of  many  a  little  violet. 
The  fluffy  eider-ducks,  that  are  swimming 
round  the  pond,  shall  lose  their  feathers,  that 
the  powder-puff  may  be  moonlike  as  it  passes 
over  Loveliness1  lovely  face.1 

1  His  Children's  Tale,  The  Small  Boy  and  the  Barley 
Sugar  (The  Parade,  1897),  should  also  be  mentioned  as 
another  case  of  shipwrecked  ingenuity. 


117 


VI 


HERE  I  propose  to  go  through  a  litany  of  some 
of  my  omissions.  In  essaying  to  depict  the 
aspects  of  an  age  there  is  always  this  pitfall, 
omission,  which  ambuscades  the  adventurous 
spirit.  For  we  who  know  so  little  even  about 
ourselves — how  can  we,  without  grave  imper- 
tinence, boldly  say  I  wish  to  bring  back  to  the 
mind  of  others  an  age  dead  and  gone  ?  Every- 
thing is  so  interwoven  in  life  that  it  is,  for 
example,  an  unwarranted  arbitrariness  to  dis- 
cuss the  literature  of  this  period  without 
brooding  on  the  black  and  white  art  of  the 
time,  or  the  canvases  of  its  painters. 

I  have  worried  for  some  space  over  Aubrey 
Beardsley,  but  I  have  not  spoken  of  men  like 
Mr.  S.  H.  Si  me,  whose  work  Beardsley  so  de- 
lighted in.  Probably  Sidney  H.  Sime's  work 
in  The  Butterfly,  The  Idler,  Pwk-me-  Up,  Eureka, 
etc.,  besides  his  book  illustrations,  is  in  some 
ways  the  most  powerfully  imaginative  of  the 
period.  There  has  been  a  Beardsley  craze, 
and  most  assuredly  there  will  be  one  day  a 
118 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

Si  me  craze,  when  collectors  have  focussed  pro- 
perly the  marvellous  suggestive  power  of  this 
artist's  work.  Unfortunately,  scattered  up  and 
down  old  magazines,  much  of  this  work  is,  as  it 
were,  lost  for  the  moment  like  Toulouse  Lautrec's 
drawings  in  papers  like  Le  Rire.  But  when  it 
is  garnered  up  in  a  worthy  book  of  drawings 
like  the  Beardsley  books,  the  power  of  Sime's 
work  will  be  undoubted.  Fortunately  Sime  is 
still  amongst  us,  and  occasionally  a  Dunsany 
book  brings  us  fresh  evidence  of  his  genius. 

Again,  I  have  not  alluded  to  Edgar  Wilson's 
bizarre  and  fascinating  decorations  of  submarine 
life  and  Japonesque  figures.  Like  Shannon, 
Ricketts,  Raven  Hill,  and  others,  he  received 
his  early  art  education  at  the  Lambeth  School 
of  Art.  At  the  end  of  the  eighties  he  began 
collecting  Japanese  prints  long  before  Beardsley 
had  left  school.  In  fact,  Edgar  Wilson  was 
one  of  the  pioneers  of  the  Japanese  print  in 
this  country — a  love  for  the  strange  which 
came  over  to  England  from  France.  A  typical 
decorative  design  of  Wilson's1  is  'In  the 
Depths  of  the  Sea,1  representing  an  octopus 
rampant  over  a  human  skull,  beneath  which 
are  two  strange  flat  fish,  and  in  the  background 

1  Edgar  Wilson  and  his  Work,  by  Arthur  Lawrence, 
The  Idler,  July,  1899. 

119 


THE   MEN  OF  THE  NINETIES 

a  sunken  old  three-decker  with  quaintly  carved 
stern  and  glorious  prow.  Pick-me-Up  first 
used  his  work  as  it  did  that  of  many  another 
young  artist,  and  in  its  back  files  much  of  his 
best  work  can  be  found.  For  The  Rambler  he 
did  different  designs  for  each  issue,  which  is 
probably  the  only  redeeming  feature  about  that 
early  Harmsworth  periodical.  The  Sketch, 
CasselTs,  Scribner's,  and  above  all  The  Idler  and 
The  Butterfly,  are  beautified  among  other 
papers  by  his  exotic  decorations. 

Once  more  I  have  not  spoken  at  all  of  Miss 
Althea  Gyles's  hectic  visions  which,  in  her  illus- 
trations for  Wilde's  The  Harlofs  House,  pro- 
bably reached  the  acme  of  the  period's  realisa- 
tion of  the  weird.  She  is  of  course  really  of  the 
Irish  symbolists,  and  not  one  of  the  nineties' 
group  at  all;  but,  in  her  Wilde  illustrations, 
she  almost  enters  the  same  field  as  the  men  of 
the  nineties.  Her  connection,  too,  with  the 
firm  of  Smithers  is  another  strong  excuse  for 
mentioning  her  work  here.  In  The  Dome  both 
her  drawings  and  poems  appeared,  while  in  the 
December  number  for  1898  there  is  a  note  on 
her  symbolism  by  W.  B.  Yeats.  In  all  her 
drawings  the  fancy  that  seems  to  have  such  free 
flight  is  in  reality  severely  ordered  by  the 
designer's  symbolism.  Sometimes  it  is  merely 
120 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

intriguing,  as  in  drawings  like  'The  Rose  of 
God,'  where  a  naked  woman  is  spread-eagled 
against  the  clouds  above  a  fleet  of  ships  and 
walled  city,  while  in  other  designs  the  symbolism 
is  full  of  suggestive  loveliness,  as  in  '  Noah's 
Raven/  'The  Ark  floats  upon  a  grey  sea 
under  a  grey  sky,  and  the  raven  flutters  above 
the  sea.  A  sea  nymph,  whose  slender  swaying 
body  drifting  among  the  grey  waters  is  a  per- 
fect symbol  of  the  soul  untouched  by  God  or 
by  passion,  coils  the  fingers  of  one  hand  about 
his  feet  and  offers  him  a  ring,  while  her  other 
hand  holds  a  shining  rose  under  the  sea. 
Grotesque  shapes  of  little  fishes  flit  about  the 
rose,  and  grotesque  shapes  of  larger  fishes  swim 
hither  and  thither.  Sea  nymphs  swim  through 
the  windows  of  a  sunken  town,  and  reach 
towards  the  rose  hands  covered  with  rings ;  and 
a  vague  twilight  hangs  over  all.'  This  is  ex- 
plained to  represent  the  search  of  man  for  the 
fleshly  beauty  which  is  so  full  of  illusions  for  us 
all,  while  the  spiritual  beauty  is  ever  far  away. 
To  this  kind  of  interpretative  design  Oscar 
Wilde's  swan  song,  The  Harlot's  House,  lends 
itself  admirably,  and  Miss  Gyles's  black  and 
white  work  here  becomes  inspired  to  the 
standard  of  Beardsley's  and  Sime's  best  work. 
The  shadow  effects  illustrating  the  stanzas, 
121 


THE   MEN   OF  THE   NINETIES 

Sometimes  a  clockwork  puppet  pressed 
A  phantom  lover  to  her  breast, 

Sometimes  they  seemed  to  try  and  sing. 

Sometimes  a  horrible  marionette 
Came  out  and  smoked  its  cigarette 
Upon  the  steps  like  a  live  thing 

must  be  seen  before  one  can  place  Althea 
Gyles^s  drawings  in  their  proper  place.  It  is 
not  a  replica  of  Beardsley,  it  is  not  a  faint  far- 
off*  imitation  of  a  Felicien  Hops  or  Armand 
Rassenfosse,  but  something  genuinely  original 
in  its  shadow-graphic  use  of  masses  of  black  on 
a  white  ground. 

Once  more,  mea  culpa,  I  have  paid  scant  at- 
tention to  Max  Beerbohm's  caricatures,  and  I 
have  failed  to  call  attention  here  to  his  earlier 
and  later  method  of  work.  I  have  not  even 
spoken  of  his  little  paper  entitled  The  Spirit  of 
Caricature,  wherein  he  discusses  the  spirit  of 
the  art  he  practises.  God  forgive  me  !  Or  yet 
again  what  meed  of  homage  have  I  yet  rendered 
to  Mr.  Will  Rothenstein's  lithographic  portraits, 
which  are  absolutely  a  necessity  to  any  one  who 
would  live  a  while  with  the  shades  of  these  men. 
Take,  for  example,  his  Liber  Juniorum^  which 
alone  contains  lithographed  drawings  of  Aubrey 
Beardsley,  Max  Beerbohm,  and  Arthur  Symons. 
Then  there  are  so  many  others  over  whose 
122 


THE   MEN   OF  THE   NINETIES 

achievements  I  must  keep  a  holy  silence,  such 
as  Mr.  Charles  Ricketts  and  his  Dial,  which  was 
published  by  the  Vale  Press,  and  to  which  John 
Gray  contributed  many  poems. 

Again,  there  are  the  colourists  of  this  group, 
particularly  Walter  Sickert  and  Charles  Conder. 
The  latter,  above  all,  is  the  colour  comrade  to 
Beardsleyls  black  and  white.  His  figures  are 
the  lovers  of  Dowson's  verse,  his  landscapes  and 
world  have  all  those  memories  of  the  golden 
time  that  haunt  the  brain  of  John  Gray  and 
Theodore  Wratislaw.  No  note,  however  short, 
on  the  nineties  would  be  complete  without  a 
halt  for  praise  of  this  painter  of  a  strangely 
coloured  dolce  far  niente.  For  everything  in 
his  work,  be  it  on  canvas,  silk  panel,  or  dainty 
fan,  is  drowsy  with  the  glory  of  colour  (as  Mr. 
Holbrook  Jackson  admirably  says),  '  colour 
suggesting  form,  suggesting  all  corporeal 
things,  suggesting  even  itself,  for  Conder 
never  more  than  hints  at  the  vivid  possibili- 
ties of  life,  more  than  a  hint  might  waken  his 
puppets  from  their  Laodicean  dream.1 

Whether  an  idyllic  landscape  or  a  fantastic 
bal  masqut  of  Montmartre  or  an  Elysian  fete 
yalante  was  his  theme,  the  work  itself  is 
always  permeated  with  the  spirit  of  Conder. 
His  nude  figure  '  Pearl/  his  '  L'Oiseau  Bleu,1 
his  'Femme  dans  une  loge  au  theatre,1  are 
123 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

typical  of  his  successful  achievements.  The 
*  Fickle  Love  "*  fan  is  but  one  of  the  numerous 
exquisite  works  he  produced  in  this  branch 
of  art ;  while  '  The  Masquerade  '  is  the  work  of 
a  Beardsley-like  fancy  which  could  colour  like 
Conder. 

Like  his  personality,  his  work  suffered  from 
certain  unhappy  moods,  and  that  is  what 
makes  so  much  of  it  uneven.  Born  in  1868, 
a  descendant  of  Louis  Francis  Roubiliac,  the 
famous  sculptor,  whose  work  for  the  figures 
of  our  eighteenth  century  porcelain  factories  is 
so  well  known,  of  Conder  it  may  be  said,  as  of 
all  artists  with  French  blood  in  them,  when  he 
is  successful  he  is  irresistible.  He  might  not  be 
able  to  draw  modern  men, but  how  beautifully  he 
drew  the  women  of  his  day  can  be  seen  in  '  l& 
Toilette.'  He  delighted,  indeed,  in  designing 
women  wandering  in  dream  gardens,  in  paint- 
ing roses  and  Princes  Charming. 

It  would  be  pleasant  to  travel  through  this 
world  of  delightful  dreams,  were  we  not  re- 
stricted of  set  purpose  to  the  literary  side  of 
the  movement.  And  has  it  not  already  been 
done  in  Mr.  Frank  Gibson's  Charles  Conder  ? 

Again,  some  of  the  publishers  who  produced 

the   books   of  these    men  have  their  right  to 

something  more  than  scant  mention.     To  Mr. 

Elkin  Mathews,  particularly  as  the  first  pub- 

124- 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

lisher  of  the  Rhymers'  Club  books  and  as  the 
issuer  of  John  Gray's  first  volume  of  poetry, 
bibliophiles  owe  a  debt  of  gratitude.  In  the 
early  days  of  the  nineties  Mr.  John  Lane 
became  associated  with  him,  until  the  autumn 
of  1894  witnessed  '  Parnassus  divided  into 
two  peaks.1  loiter,  after  the  Wilde  debacle, 
an  extraordinary  figure,  worthy  of  a  romance, 
in  the  person  of  the  late  Leonard  Smithers, 
who  was  at  one  time  in  the  legal  profession 
at  Sheffield,  took  the  field  as  a  publisher  by 
way  of  H.  S.  Nichols.  He  was  no  mere  pub- 
lisher but  a  man  of  considerable  scholarship, 
who  not  only  issued  but  finished  the  Sir  Richard 
Burton  translation  of  Catullus.  Round  him, 
to  a  considerable  extent,  the  vanishing  group 
rallied  for  a  little  while  before  Death  smote 
them  one  by  one.  Here  is  no  place  to  pay 
due  justice  to  this  amiable  Benvenuto  Cellini 
of  book  printing  himself,  but  it  must  be  re- 
membered his  figure  bulks  largely  in  the  closing 
scenes.  He  kept  Dowson  from  starvation. 
Beardsley  wrote  of  him  as  *  our  publisher.'1 
He,  when  others  failed,  had  the  courage  to 

1  It  is  interesting  that  in  an  unpublished  letter  of 
Beardsley's  to  Smithers  when  the  latter  was  intending 
to    produce    The    Peacock,  an    unpublished    quarterly, 
Beardsley  promises  him  his  best  work. 
125 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

launch  on  the  English  publishing  market  the 
released  Wilde's  now  famous  Ballad  of  Reading 
Gaol.  If  he  did  exceed  certain  rules  for  him- 
self, he  at  least  took  risks  to  help  others.  He 
was  no  supine  battener  on  the  profits  of  books 
for  young  ladies'"  seminaries.  He  was  a  printer, 
and  his  bankruptcy  may  be  said  to  have  closed 
the  period. 

Lastly  in  this  chaunt  of  omissions  comes  the 
drama  of  the  nineties.  Unfortunately  the 
drama,  in  so  far  as  it  affects  the  group  of 
the  nineties  with  which  we  are  concerned, 
is  almost  a  nullity.  Aubrey  Beardsley  once 
commenced  a  play,  which  was  never  heard  of, 
in  collaboration  with  Brandon  Thomas. 
Ernest  Dowson  wrote  what  Beardsley  called 
a  '  tiresome '  playlet.  John  Davidson  perpe- 
trated a  number  of  plays  such  as  Bruce  (1886), 
Smith,  a  tragic  farce  (1888),  Scaramouch  in 
Naxos,  and  two  other  plays  in  1889  when 
he  was  feeling  his  way,  and  translated  much 
later  as  hackwork  a  play  of  Francois  Coppee's 
and  Victor  Hugo's  Ruy  Bias.  Theodore  Peters' 
pastoral  and  other  similar  trifles  only  go  to 
show  how  barren  the  group  itself  was  in  the 
dramatist's  talent.  Nor  can  much  be  said  for 
such  poetic  plays  as  Theodore  Wratislaw's  The 
Pity  of  Love. 

126 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

But  it  must  be  remembered,  as  a  matter  of 
fact,  such  a  sweeping  conclusion  may  not  only 
be  unjust  but  even  impertinent.  For  where 
in  all  the  theatres  of  the  London  of  the 
nineties  would  the  plays  (if  they  had  been 
written)  of  these  young  men  have  found  a 
home  ?  Probably  the  dramatic  output  of  the 
nineties  was  nil  because  there  were  no  small 
theatres  in  London  at  that  date  of  the  type  to 
give  these  young  men  a  hope  that  any  works 
they  might  write  could  be  produced.  So  only 
at  the  end  of  the  decade  do  we  see  the 
dramatic  outburst  when  the  Irish  movement 
founded  a  theatre  of  its  own  and  produced 
J.  M.  Synge,  and  also  when  Miss  Horniman 
gave  Manchester  a  repertory  theatre,  and  then 
Stanley  Houghton  came. 

True,  at  the  same  period  as  the  nineties 
Oscar  Wilde  was  producing  plays  burlesquing 
the  world  of  Society,  and  Bernard  Shaw  was 
getting  ready  to  launch  his  own  works  by 
bombasting  every  one  else's ;  but  the  little 
movement  of  the  younger  men  remained 
dramatically  dumb.  Nothing  came  even  when 
George  Moore  produced  The  Strike  at  Arling- 
ford  and  John  Todhunter  The  Black  Cat.  It 
is  a  hard  thing  to  believe  that  all  these  young 
men  were  devoid  of  the  dramatic  instinct.  I 
127 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

prefer  for  my  part  to  blame  the  London 
theatrical  world  for  the  lack  of  those  minute 
theatres  which  have  become  so  much  a  part  of 
the  night  life  of  big  continental  cities  and  are 
so  admirably  adapted  for  the  production  of  the 
works  of  new  dramatists. 

Indeed,  the  theatrical  atmosphere  of  London 
at  that  time  was  in  its  usual  perpetual  state 
of  stuffiness.  There  was  not  even  a  beneficent 
society  then  such  as  we  now  have  in  the 
Pioneer  Players,  whose  theatre  (if  one  may  so 
symbolise  it)  is  the  charity  house  for  emanci- 
pated dramatists.  Ibsen's  Doll's  House  had 
been  produced  in  London  just  before  the 
nineties1  epoch  began,  and,  like  anything  new  in 
popular  art  over  here,  raised  the  hue-and-cry. 
Then,  too,  the  big  '  star ""  curse,  which  Wilde 
himself  so  justly  spurned,  was  permanently 
settled  on  our  own  insular  drama  like  a  strangle- 
hold on  the  author. 

Outside  England,  in  the  big  art  world  of  the 
continent,  Schnitzler  was  beginning  in  Vienna.1 
Maurice  Maeterlinck,  in  Belgium,  had  begun 2 
too  the  drama  of  expressive  silences  which 
came  to  light  in  Paris.  There  were  Suder- 
mann  and  Hauptmann  in  Germany ;  Eche- 
garay  in  Spain ;  D'Annunzio  in  Italy ;  Ibsen 

1  Anatol,  1889-90.     2  La  PrincMse  Mahine,  1889. 

128 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

and  Bjornstjerne  Bjornson  finishing  their  work 
for  the  Scandinavian  drama;  while  the  play- 
wrights of  Paris  were,  as  always,  feverishly 
fabricating  all  sorts  of  movements,  as  when 
Paul  Fort,  a  boy  of  eighteen,  founds  in 
1890  the  Theatre  d'Art.  But  what  was  going 
on  in  England  ?  Pinero's  The  Second  Mrs. 
Tanqueray,  Wilde's  Salomt,  and  his  light 
comedies,  together  with  stuff'  by  Henry  Arthur 
Jones,  Sydney  Grundy,  etc.,  represented  the 
serious  drama.  The  critics  were  perturbed,  as 
they  generally  are.  The  musical  comedy  and 
its  singing,  pirouetting  soubrettes  deluded  the 
populace  into  the  belief  that  it  had  a  great 
drama,  when  all  these  spectacles  should  really 
have  been  housed  in  London  in  spacious  tea- 
rooms for  the  benefit  of  that  multitude  which  is 
fond  of  tinkling  melody  and  teapots.  There  was 
not  even  in  London  a  single  Uberbrettlbuhnen, 
as  the  Germans  mouth  it,  where  those  who  love 
beer  could  go  to  hear  poets  recite  their  verse 
a  la  Otto  Bierbaum,  let  alone  little  theatres 
where  what  we  so  dolefully  term  the  serious 
drama  could  be  played. 

Even,    too,    in    those   days,   the  newspaper 

critics,    muzzled    by   the  business  department, 

which  has  never  any  wish  to  lose  its  theatrical 

advertisements,  said  little,  with  a  few  honest 

129  K 


THE   MEN  OF  THE  NINETIES 

exceptions  like  Bernard  Shaw.  Max  Beer- 
bohm,  when  he  took  over  the  critical  work  of 
Shaw  on  The  Saturday  Review  was  obviously 
unhappy.  English  theatres  rapidly  became  as 
elaborate  and  as  pompous  as  the  Church  Mili- 
tant in  its  palmy  days.  They  kept  growing 
in  size.  In  London,  indeed,  the  small  theatre 
never  had  its  boom.  Indeed,  the  nineties  was 
the  age  when  the  big  theatres  were  being  built 
to  fill  their  owners1  pockets  and  the  men  of  the 
nineties  themselves  (be  it  for  whatever  reason 
you  like)  did  not  produce  a  single  play. 


130 


EPILOGUE 

IT  all  seems  a  long  time  ago  now  since  those 
days  when  Verlaine  was  as  a  lantern  for  these 
young  men's  feet,  to  guide  them  through  the 
mazes  of  Art.  Thirty  years  ago  and  more 
Wilde  was  disclosing  'decollete  spirits  of 
astonishing  conversation " ;  Zola  influenced  that 
Bvron  of  pessimism,  Thomas  Hardy,  to  beget 
Jiide  the  Obscure  (1895),  and  when  the  critics 
assailed  him  the  "Wessex  giant  guarded  a  '  holy 
silence1  which  has  denied  us  up  till  now  an 
emancipated  novel  such  as  the  French  and 
Italians  have,  though  James  Joyce  may  yet 
achieve  it  for  us.  It  was  also  the  age  of  youth 
in  hansom  cabs  looking  out  on  the  lights  of 
London's  West  End  which  spread  out  before 
them  as  in  a  '  huge  black  velvet  flower.1  Ibsen, 
Tolstoy,  Maeterlinck,  Nietzsche,  D'Annunzio, 
and  Dostoievsky  were  beginning  to  percolate 
through  by  means  of  translations  that  opened 
out  a  new  world  into  which  everybody  hastily 
swarmed.  It  was  an  age  in  which  young  men 
131 


THE  MEN  OF  THE  NINETIES 

frankly  lauded  the  value  of  egoism.  Indeed, 
it  was  essentially  the  age  of  young  men.  In 
those  days  a  genital  restiveness  which  came 
over  from  France  started  the  sex  equation.  A 
hothouse  fragrance  swept  across  the  pudibond 
wastes  of  our  literature.  Hectics  came  glorying 
in  their  experiences.  Richard  of  the  Golden 
Girl  with  his  banjo  lifts  up  his  voice  to  chaunt 
'  a  bruised  daffodil  of  last  night's  sin.1  Women 
like  George  Egerton  in  her  Keynotes  take 
questions  further  than  Mrs.  Lynn  Linton  had 
ever  done  in  the  previous  decade.  Exoticism, 
often  vulgar  when  not  in  master  hands,  blabbed 
out  its  secrets  in  works  like  The  Woman  who  Did. 
Confounding  the  good  with  the  bad,  a  wail 
went  up  against  the  so-called  gospel  of  in- 
tensity. Sometimes  it  was  in  the  serious 
reviews  and  weeklies ;  at  another  time  it  was 
Harry  Quilter.  Some  young  undergraduates 
at  Oxford,  even  in  Aristophanes  at  Oxford 
(May,  1894),  were  filled  with  'an  honest  dislike 
for  Dorian  Gray,  Salome",  The  Yellow  Book,  and 
the  whole  of  the  lackadaisical,  opium-cigarette 
literature  of  the  day.1  Punch  produced  a 
Beardsley  Britannia  and  sang  of: 

The  Yellow  Poster  girl  looked  out 

From  her  pinkly  purple  heaven, 

One  eye  was  blue  and  one  was  green, 


THE   MEN   OF  THE  NINETIES 

Her  bang  was  cut  uneven. 

She  had  three  fingers  on  one  hand. 

And  the  hairs  on  her  head  were  seven. 

And  all  these  criticisms  now,  all  these  quarrels, 
are  like  old  spent  battlefields  the  sands  of 
gracious  time  have  covered  over  and  hidden 
from  view.  Alone  the  best  work  of  the  period 
remains  ;  for  good  art  has  no  period  or  special 
vogue. 

Indeed,  the  elements  that  destroy  the  worth- 
less, that  winnow  the  chaff  from  the  grain, 
have  been  at  work.  For  us,  indeed,  this  land- 
scape has  changed  from  what  it  once  was,  and 
looking  at  it  now  we  acquire  a  new  impression 
which  was  denied  to  the  critics  of  the  age 
itself.  Some  of  us,  without  a  doubt,  have 
gone  to  the  opposite  extreme  and  prattle  about 
it  as  an  age  of  platitudes,  and  accuse  a  work  of 
art  of  being  as  old  as  The  Yellow  Book.  One 
might  as  well  accuse  a  violet  of  being  as  old  as 
the  Greek  Anthology.  For  always,  to  those 
wandering  back  in  the  right  spirit  to  those 
days,  there  will  come  something  of  the  infinite 
zest  which  stirred  the  being  of  the  men  of  the 
nineties  to  create  art.  It  was  such  an  honest 
effort  that  one  has  to  think  of  those  times  when 
Marlowe  and  his  colleagues  were  athrob  with 
aesthetic  aspiration  to  find  a  similitude.  The 
133 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

nineties,  indeed,  are  a  pleasant  flower-garden  in 
our  literature  over  which  many  strange  per- 
fumes float.  There  are  times  when  one  wishes 
to  retreat  into  such  places,  as  there  are  moments 
when  the  backwaters  enchant  us  from  the  main 
stream. 

It  has  been  said  it  was  an  age  of  nerves.  If  by 
this  is  implied  a  keener  sensitiveness  to  certain 
feelings  pulsating  in  the  art  of  this  movement, 
one  will  not  have  very  far  to  go  to  find  its 
cause  in  the  French  impressionistic  school  of 
Manet,  which,  after  saturating  all  types  of 
French  artists,  undoubtedly  invaded  writers 
over  here  even  before  the  movement  of  the 
nineties  began.  On  the  age  without  a  doubt  it 
had  a  lasting  influence,  so  that  to  a  certain 
degree,  without  being  over-busy  with  what  went 
before,  we  may  say  its  writers  brought  it  to  no 
small  degree  into  common  use  in  our  literature. 
But  just  as  impressionism  in  painting  had 
existed  centuries  before  in  the  ever-busy  mind 
of  men  like  Leonardo  da  Vinci,  one  cannot  go 
so  far  as  to  say  it  had  never  existed  before 
in  our  literature.  Such  a  statement  would  be 
perhaps  frivolous.  But  it  was  with  these  men 
it  first  came  to  exist  as  a  kind  of  cry  of  a 
new  clan.  It  was  these  men  who  were  essen- 
tially hectics  who  essayed  to  etch  the  exotic 
134 


THE   MEN  OF  THE    NINETIES 

impression.  The  majority  of  the  work  of  the 
movement,  in  fact,  can  be  described  as  im- 
pressionisms of  the  abnormal  by  a  group  of 
individualists.  For  in  all  their  work  the  pre- 
dominant keynote  will  be  found  to  be  a  keen 
sense  of  that  strangeness  of  proportion  which 
Bacon  noted  as  a  characteristic  of  what  he 
called  beauty.  It  is  observable  as  much  in 
the  poems  of  Dowson  as  in  the  drawings  of 
Beardsley,  two  of  the  leading  types  of  the 
movement.  It  vibrates  intensely  in  the  minor 
work  of  men  like  Wratislaw,  and  also  in  John 
Gray's  early  volume,  as  I  have  endeavoured 
to  show.  All  Mr.  Arthur  Symons's  criticism 
is  a  narration  of  his  soul's  adventures  in  quest 
of  it.  It  stirred  the  genius  of  Charles  Conder, 
and  vitalizes  the  rather  cruel  analysis  of 
Hubert  Crackanthorpe.  We  see  it  almost  as 
the  animating  spirit  of  the  age  itself  in  Oscar 
Wilde's  poems,  The  Sphinx  and  The  Harlofs 
House.  It  has  become  disseminated  like  a 
perfume  from  the  writings  of  Pater  in  the  men 
who  came  after  him.  It  was,  so  to  speak,  a 
quickening  stimulus  to  them  as  the  rediscovery 
of  a  manuscript  of  Catullus,  or  a  Greek  figure 
was  in  the  years  of  the  Renaissance  itself. 
With  it  came  a  sense  of  freedom.  An  attempt 
was  made,  because  of  it,  for  instance,  to 
135 


THE   MEN  OF  THE   NINETIES 

emancipate  our  literature  to  the  same  extent 
as  the  literatures  of  Latin  countries  move 
untrammelled  by  a  hesitancy  in  the  choice  of 
certain  themes.  And  people  at  the  time,  watch- 
ing the  fate  of  the  prime  movers,  cried  with 
a  great  deal  of  assurance,  '  That  way  lies 
madness  ! ' 

Be  this  as  it  may,  the  men  of  the  nineties 
bequeathed  a  certain  subtleness  of  emotion  to 
our  art  that  is  not  without  its  value.  They 
took  Byron's  satanism  and  inflamed  it  with 
the  lurid  light  of  Baudelaire.  Buveurs  de  lune 
after  the  manner  of  Paul  Verlaine,  they 
evoked  something  of  the  ethereal  glamour  of 
moonlight  itself.  A  realist  like  Crackan- 
thorpe  tried  to  tread  the  whole  via  dolorosa 
without  faltering  by  the  wayside.  Poetry 
caught  the  mood  of  bizarre  crises  and  Edgar 
Wilson  wrought  a  strange  delicate  world  of 
visions.  In  Max  Beerbohm  irony  took  on  a 
weird  twinge  of  grace  almost  Pierrot-like. 
Perhaps,  indeed,  they  all  had  something  of 
the  Pierrot  quality  in  them.  Beardsley  him- 
self was  enchanted  by  that  little  opera  without 
words,  '  LTEnfant  Prodigue.1  Dowson  made  a 
play  about  him.  The  Happy  Hypocrite  might 
be  a  story  of  the  Pierrot  himself  grown  old. 

As  I  have  hinted,  much  of  the  work  con- 
136 


THE   MEN  OF  THE  NINETIES 

ceived  by  these  men  was  doomed  to  die,  as 
in  the  case  of  every  movement.  What 
then  remains,  what  is  their  balance  to  the 
good  ?  Who  knows  ?  About  everything  man 
has  loved  and  fashioned  there  abides  vestiges 
of  the  interest  of  humanity.  Only  some 
things  are  easier  to  recall  than  others.  They 
stand  out  more,  so  that  one  is  bound  to  remark 
them.  They  have,  so  to  speak,  a  cachet  of 
their  own.  Among  these  in  this  movement 
there  comes  the  work  of  the  men  I  have  so 
hastily  attempted  to  realise.  Each  has  about 
him  something  of  that  quality  which  is  in- 
definable, but  easily  recognisable.  Each  has 
his  charm  for  those  who  care  to  come  with  a 
loving  interest. 


137 


INDEX 


Academy,  The,  106. 
Adams,  Francis,  102. 
Adrian  Rome,  58. 
Adventures    of  John    Johns, 

The,  60. 

sEneias,  The,  28. 
Albemarle,  'I he,  69. 
Allen,  Grant,  102. 
Amor  Umbratiiis,  88. 
Anatol,  128. 
Anatomy  of  Melancholy,  The, 

108. 

Anquetin,  4. 
Antony   Garstin's    Courtship, 

76. 

Apuleius,  32. 
A  Rebours,  58. 
Aretino,  Pietro,  27. 
Aristophanes,  18,  26,  27. 
Aristophanes  at  Oxford,  132. 
Art  of  Thomas  Hardy,   The, 

108. 

Artist's  Model,  An,  39. 
Ascension  of  St.  Rose  of  Lima, 

The,  25. 
Alalanta,  38. 
Aubrey  Bear dsley,  20,  29. 
Aubrey    Beardsley    and    The 

Yellow  Book,  37. 
Aurora  La  Cujifii,  65. 
Autumn  City,  An,  52. 
Avenue  Theatre,  21. 

BACON,  Francis,  79,  135. 
Ballad  of  a  Barber,  The,  30, 

44,8s. 
Ballad  of  a  Nun,  The,  93,  94. 


Ballad  of  an  Artist's  Wife, 
The,  94. 

Ballad  of  Hell,  94. 

Ballad  of  Heading  Gaol,  The, 
24,  126. 

Ballads,  93. 

Balzac,  44,  64. 

Bantock,  Granville,  99. 

Baptist  Lake,  5,  93. 

Barber,  The,  85. 

Barrie,  J.  M.,  55. 

Battledore  and  Shuttlecock,  72. 

Baudelaire,  Charles,  81,  84, 
136. 

Bayros,  Franz  von,  26,  28,  31. 

Beardsley,  Aubrey,  i,  2,  4,  6, 
8-14,  16-19.  23-32,  34,  35, 
37-39,  41-45,  47,  59,  61, 
89,  91,  93,  112,  115,  116, 
118,  119,  121-123,  125,  126, 

135.  136- 

Beardsley,  Aubrey,  20,  29. 
Beardsley,    Aubrey,    and    the 

Yellow  Book,  37. 
Beardsley,  Aubrey,   The  Last 

Letters  of,  14. 
Beardsley  Girl,  The,  22. 
Becke,  Louis.  58,  69. 
Beerbohm,  Max,    23,    33,  43, 

&3>   95>   IO2«   IIOi   "i-11/! 

122,  130,  136. 
Bierbaum,  Otto,  129. 
Binyon,  Laurence.  8. 
Birch  Bark  School,  83. 
Bjornson,  Bjornstjerne,  129. 
Black  Cat,  The,  127. 
Black  Coffee,  38. 


139 


INDEX 


Blake,  William,  19,  35,  44,  51. 

Blake,  William,  and  his  Il- 
lustrations to  the  '  Divine 
Corned}','  43,  44. 

Blatter  fur  aie  Kunst,  3. 

Blessed  Damozel,  The,  22. 

Bodley  Head,  The,  38,  40,  91. 

Bodley  Press,  The,  8. 

Book  of  Fifty  Drawings,  A ,  24. 

Botticelli,  Sandro,  19. 

Bovril,  56. 

Brentano's,  99. 

Brighton,  Beardsley  at.  14,  15, 
23- 

British  Museum,  29. 

Brooke,  Stopford  A.,  75. 

Brown,  Professor,  16. 

Browne,  Sir  Thomas,  47. 

Browning,  Robert,  48. 

Bruce,  126. 

Burne-Jones,  Sir  Edward,  16, 

17- 

Burton,  Robert,  108. 
Burton,  Sir  Richard  F.,  125. 
Butterfly,  The,  36,  118,  120. 
Byron,  Lord,  136. 

CAF£  ROYAL,  8,  23,  89,  116. 

Called  Back,  67. 

Cardinal' sSnu/-Box,  The,  40. 

Carman,  Bliss,  45. 

Carmen  Cl. ,  45. 

Casanova,  31. 

Case  of  Conscience,  A,  67. 

Cas<e 'II' 's  Magazine,  120. 

Catullus,  45,  125,  135. 

Caume,  Pierre,  26. 

Cazotte,  14. 

Celestial  Liters,  The,  14. 

Cena  Tri-malchionis,  34. 

Century  Guild  Hobby  Horse, 

The.  88. 

Chamberlain,  A.  B.,  80. 
Chameleon,  The,  36. 
Charing  Cross  Road,  28. 
Charles  Conder,  124. 
Chaucer,  Geoffrey,  27. 


Chemist  in  the  Suburbs,  The, 

68. 

Cheshire  Cheese,  8,  10,  79. 
Chiswick  Press,  42. 
Chord,  The,  36. 
City  of  the  Snul,  The,  79. 
Climax,  The,  61. 
Comedy  of  Masks,  A,  58,  87. 
Comedy  of  Sighs,  The,  21. 
Conder,  Charles,    4,    n,    41, 

44,61,  123,  124,  135. 
Confessions  of  a  Young  Man, 

The,  57. 

Conflict  of  Egoisms,  A,  70. 
Congreve,  William,  i,  16. 
Conrad,  Joseph,  12,  45,  58,  69. 
Con  way,  Hugh,  67. 
Cooke,  j.  Y.  F..  72. 
Copp6e,  Francois,  126. 
Covent  Garden,  23. 
Crackanthorpe,     Hubert,      8, 

ii,   44,  47,   57,  58.  61,  64, 

67-77,  101,  135,  136. 
Crane,  Walter,  80. 
Crashaw,  Richard,  103. 
Custance,  Olive,  82. 

Dame  aux  Camtlias,  /.a,  18. 

D'Annunzio,  Gabrielle,  46, 
128,  131. 

Dante   19. 

Dark  Angel,  The,  104. 

Davidson,  John,  5,  8,  56,  59, 
80,  83,  86,  91-97,  126. 

Days  and  Nights,  48. 

Dead  Woman,  A,  71. 

Death  of  Peter  Waydelin, 
The,  i;2,  63. 

Death,  of  Pierrot,  The,  45. 

Decadent  Movement  in  Litera- 
ture, The,  47. 

Decorations,  89. 

Defence  of  Cosmetics,  A,  in. 

Dent,  J.  M.,  8,  17. 

Dewhurst,  Wynford,  99. 

Dial,  The,  123. 

Dickens,  Charles,  7,  62. 


140 


INDEX 


Dilemmas,  67. 

Dircks,  Rudolf,  42,  64. 

Discords,  64. 

Divine  Comedy,  The,  19. 

Doll's  House,  A,  128. 

Dome,  The,  36,  120. 

Don  nay,  Maurice,  27. 

Dostoievsky,  Feodor,  131. 

Douglas,  Lord  Alfred,  64. 
79,  in. 

Dowson,  Ernest,  8,  9,  n, 
41-45,  47,  50  53,  58-61, 
63,  67,  79-81,  83,  84,  86-89, 
95,  96,  99,  123,  125,  126, 

135-   136- 

Du  Maurier,  George,  58,  81. 
Dunsany,  Lord,  119. 
Duse,  hleonora,  46. 
Dying  of  Francis  Donne,  The, 

44.  63. 

Earl  Lavender,  5. 

Echegaray,  Jose1,  128. 

Egerton,  George,  64,  132, 

1880,  114. 

Eighteen  Nineties,  The,  92. 

Ellis,  Edwin  J.,  80. 

Embers,  71. 

English      Literature,     1880- 

J?OS.  39- 
Episodes,  64,  1 02. 
Ernest  Dow  son ,  81. 
Erotische  Kunst,  28. 
Essay  on  Beauty,  79. 
Essays  in  Modernity,  102. 
Esther  Khan,  52. 
Etienne  Mat  ton,  73. 
Eureka,  118. 
Evans,  Caradoc,  77. 
Evelyn  Innes,  6,  43,  58. 
Evergreen,  The.  36. 
Extreme  Unction,  89. 

Fat  Woman,  The,  17. 
Femmes  Damntes,  84. 
fifes  Gallantes,  81. 
Fille  aux  Yeux  d'Or,  La,  44. 


Fitzroy  Settlement,  80. 
Flaubert,  Gustave,  6. 
Fleet  Street  Eclogues,  93. 
Fort,  Paul,  4,  129. 
Frontispiece    to     the     Chopin 

Nocturnes,  38. 
Fuchs,  Eduard,  28. 
Fuller,  Loi'e,  99. 

GALE,  Norman,  82. 
Gallon,  Arthur,  102. 

Garnett,  Edward,  80. 

Gaston  Lalanne's  Child,  73. 

Gautier,  The'ophile,  15. 

Gentle  Art  of  Making  Ene- 
mies, The,  101,  113. 

George,  Stephan,  3. 

Gibson,  Frank,  124. 

Gillray,  James,  28. 

Gissing,  George,  57,  58 

Graham,      R.     B.     Cunning- 
hame,  65. 

Grahame,  Kenneth,  65. 

Gray.  John,  14,  18,  43,  80-82, 
123,  125,  135. 

Green  Carnation,  The,  60. 

Greenaway,  Kate,  15. 

Greene,  George  Arthur,  80. 

Grundy,  Mrs.,  27. 

Grundy,  Sydney,  129. 

Guardian   Life  and   Fire  As- 
surance Co. ,  1 6. 

Guys,  Constantine,  17. 

Gyles,  Althea,  120-122. 

HAMERTON,  P.  G.,  115. 
Happy  Hypocrite,  The,  63, 116, 

137- 
Happy    Wanderer,    The,    82, 

112. 

Hardy,  Thomas,  8,  12,  55,  57, 

69.  76,  131. 
Harland,    Henry,    12,    37-40, 

58,  64. 
Harlot's  House,    The,    5,  79, 

120,  121,  135. 
Harper's  Magazine,  47. 


141 


INDEX 


Harris,  Frank,  58. 
Hauptmann,  Gerhardt,  128. 
Hemingway,  Percy,  68,  82. 
Henley,  W.  E.,  8-10,  58,  64, 

79,  102,  105. 
Herbert,  George,  103. 
Herodas,  61. 
fferodias,  46. 
Hichens,  Robert,  60. 
Hill,  Raven,  119. 
Hillier,  Arthur  Cecil,  80. 
Hobby  Horse,  The,  36 
Hogarth  Club,  38. 
Home,  Herbert  P.,  80. 
Horniman,  Miss,  127. 
Houghton,  Stanley,  127. 
Hound  of  Heaven,  The,  79. 
House  of  Pomegranates,  The,  5. 
How  Queen  Guenever  made  her 

a  Nun,  25. 
Hugo,  Victor,  126. 
Huneker,  James,  52. 
Huysmans,  J.  K.,  57. 
Hypnerotomachia,  The,  13. 
Hypocrite,  The,  59. 

IBSEN,  Henrik,  128,  131. 
Idiots,  The,  45. 
Idler,  The,  36,  116,  118-120. 
Image,  Selwyn,  43. 
Imaginary  Portraits,  52. 
In  a  Music  Hall,  92. 
Inconsolables,  71. 
Incurable,  no 

Influence    of    Baudelaire    in 
France  and  England,  The, 

34- 

Intentions,  101. 
In  the  Depths  of  the  Sea,  119. 

JACKSON,  Holbrook,  92,  123. 
James,  Henry,  40,  43,  57,  69, 

75- 

James,  Humphrey,  42. 
Jammes,  Francis,  69. 
Job,  19. 


Johnson,  Lionel,  80,  95,  102- 

no. 

Johnson,  Noel,  99. 
Jones,  Alfred,  99. 
Jones,  Henry  Arthur,  129. 
Joyce,  James,  77,  131. 
Jude  the  Obscure,  12,  131. 
Juvenal,  24,  28. 

KEATS,  John,  87,  88. 
Kelmscott  Press,  17. 
Kennedy,  J.  M.,  39. 
Keynotes,  64,  132. 
'  Kid-glove  School,'  10. 
Kipling,   Rudyard,  4,   12,  55, 

63,  69. 
Kubin,  Alfred,  28. 

La  Faustine,  26,  52. 
La  Jeunesse,  Ernest,  60. 
Lake  Isle  of  Innitfree,  The,  10. 
Lamb,  Charles,  113. 
Lambeth  School  of  Art,  119. 
Lane,  John,  37,  83,  125. 
Last  Studies,  75 . 
Lautrec,  Toulouse,  4,  26,  51, 

119. 

Lawrence,  Arthur,  119. 
Le  Gallienne,  Richard,  5,  58, 

65,  80,  82,  102,  132. 
L' Enfant  Prodigue,  136. 
Le  I? ire,  119. 
Liber  Juniorum,  122. 
Lilies  of  France,  The,  no. 
Lind,  Letty,  38. 
Linton,  Mrs.  Lynn,  132. 
Literature  at  Nurse,  6. 
London  Nights,  49,  51. 
Louys,  Pierre,  84. 
Love-sick  Curate,  The,  73. 
Lowry,  H.  D.,  64. 
Lucian,  28. 
Luska,    Sidney    (i.e.    Henry 

Harland),  40. 
Lysistrata,  The,  18,  24,  26-29. 

MACCOLL,  D.  S.,  29. 


142 


INDEX 


Machen,  Arthur,  58,  64. 
Madame  Bavary,  18. 
Mademoiselle  de  Maupin,  15, 

18,  34,  32. 

Mademoiselle  Miss,  40. 
Maeterlinck,     Maurice,    128, 

161. 

Maitresse  d*  Esthetes,  59. 
Mallarm6,    St^phane,    3,   46, 

81,  84,  ,88. 

Manet,  Eduard,  3,  134. 
Manon  Lescaut,  18. 
Mariusthe  Epicurean,  57,  in. 
Marlowe,  Christopher,  16, 134. 
Afarpessa,  61. 
Marriott- Watson,  Rosamund, 

82. 

Mathews,  Elkin,  83,  124. 
Mattos,  Henri  Teixeira  de,  84. 
Maupassant,   Guy  de,  63,  71. 
Mhnoires  (Casanova),  32. 
Meredith,  George,  8,  43,  55, 

69. 

Merrick,  Leonard,  58. 
Mike  Fletcher,  7. 
Mimes,  61. 

Mirbeau,  Octave,  112. 
Miskka,  85. 

Mr.  Midshipman  Easy,  in. 
Modern  Melodrama,  73. 
Modern  Painting,  6. 
Mogreb-el-Acksa,  65. 
Moliere,  56. 

Monet,  Claude,  3,  49,  79. 
Moore,  Arthur,  58,  87. 
Moore,  George,  3,  5-7,  43,  55, 

57.  58,  127. 
More,  112. 
Morris,  William,  17. 
Morrison,  Arthur,  58,  69. 
Morte  d' Arthur,  Le,  8,  17,  18, 

25- 
Murdoch,  W.   G.   Blaikie,    2, 

21,  41,  48. 

Murger,  Henri,  9,  58. 
My  People,  77. 
Mystic  and  Cavalier,  105. 


National  Observer,  The.  8,  10. 
Nerval,  Gerard  de,  51. 
Nettleship,  J.  T.,  80. 
Nevinson,  H.  W.,  65. 
New  Ballad  of  Tdnnhauser, 

A,  94. 

New  Grub  Street,  57. 
New  Hedonism,  The,  102. 
New  Illustrator,  A,  17. 
Newman,  John  Henry,  108. 
Nichols,  H.  S. ,  42,  125. 
Nietzsche,  Friedrich  Wilhelm, 

9L  131- 

No.  j  John  Street,  58. 
Non  sum  qualis   eram  bonae 

sub  regno  Cynarae,  89. 
North  Coast  and  Eleanor,  The, 

67- 

Odin  Howes,  60. 

On  Books  and  Art,  62. 

On  the  Kind  of  Fiction  called 

Morbid,  43. 

Orgeas  and  Mirandou,  63. 
O'Sullivan,  Vincent,  43. 
Other  Side,  The,  64. 
Out  of  Egypt,  65. 

PACHMANN,  Vladimir  de,  46. 
Pageant,  The,  36,  no. 
Parade,  The,  36,  117. 
Past  and  Present,  15. 
Pater,  The  Work  of  Mr.,  106. 
Pater,  Walter,  5,  48,  52,  57, 

101,  104,  108,  ^35. 
Payne,  John,  3. 
Peacock,  The,  125. 
Pennell,  Joseph,  17. 
Perfervid,  92,  95. 
Perversion  of  Rouge,  The,  33. 
Peters,  William  Theodore,  40, 

80,  83,  91,  97-99,  126. 
Petronius,  34. 
Phillips,  Stephen,  61,  79. 
Pick-me-Up,  36,  112,  118. 
Picture  of  Dorian  Gray,  The, 

57,  132- 

143 


INDEX 


Pierrot  and  the  Statue,  97. 
Pierrot  of  the  Minute,    The, 

24  91,  99. 
Pinero,  A.  W. ,  129. 
Pioneer  Players,  128. 
Pity  of  Love,  The,  126. 
Plarr,  Victor,  80,  81.  87,  90. 
Pope,  Alexander,  18. 
Posies  out  nf  Rings,  97. 
Post  Liminium,  106. 
Poster,  The,  36. 
Pre-Raphaelites,  4,  14,  17. 
Princesse  Maleine,  La,  128. 
Profiles,  70. 
Propertius,  89. 
Prose  Fancies,  5, 
Prose  Poems,  5. 
Pseudonym  Library,  The,  22. 
Punch,  22,  132. 

Quarfier  Latin,  The,  97. 

Quarto,  The.  36. 

Quest  of  the  Golden  Girl,  The, 

5,  58. 
Quilter,  Harry,  132. 

RADFORD,  Dollie,  82. 
Radford,  Ernest,  80. 
Rambler,  The,  120. 
Random  Itinerary,  A,  93. 
Ranger-Gull,  Cyril,  59. 
Rape  of  the  Lock,  The,  18,  19, 

24-26. 
Rassenfosse  Armand,   26,  28, 

122. 

Redon,  Odelon,  26. 
Regnier,  H.  F.  J.,  4. 
Reigen,  32. 
Renaissance  of  the  Nineties, 

The,  2,  21,  41. 
Renoir,  P.  A.,  79. 
denunciations,  67. 
Restif  de  la  Breton,  32. 
Restoration  dramatists,  15. 
Rhymers'  Club,  10.  n,  59,  79, 

80,  82,  88,  91,  125. 
Rhys,  Ernest,  44,  80. 


Ricketts,  Charles,  119,  123. 
Rimbaud,  Arthur,  84.,  85. 
Roberts,  C.  G.  D.,  58. 
Roberts,  Morley,  80. 
Roi  Pausole,  Le,  32. 
Rolleston,    Thomas   William, 

83- 

Rops,  F61icien,  17,  26,  122. 
Rose,  Edward,  80. 
Rose  Leaf,  The,  36. 
Ross,  Robert,  13,  19,  20,  24, 

29. 

Rossetti,  D.  G.,  31. 
Rothenstein,   William,  4,  43, 

91,  122. 

Rowlandson,  Thomas,  27. 
Runnable  Stag,  A,  95. 
Ruy  Bias,  126. 

Salami,  5,  17,  18,  22,  25,  29, 
61,  86,  129.  132. 

Saltus,  Francis,  43. 

Saturday  Review,  The,  130. 

Savoy,  The,  10-12,  24,  36,  37, 
40-46,  50,  89. 

Scaramouch  in  Naxos,  126. 

Schnitzler,  Arthur,  32.  128. 

Scofs  Observer,  The,  10. 

Scribner's  Magazine,  120. 

Seaward  Lackland,  54. 

Second  Book  of  fifty  Draw- 
ings, A,  24. 

Second  Mrs.  Tanqueray,  The, 
129. 

Shakespeare,  William,  18,  56. 

Shannon,  Charles  H.,  43,  119 

Shaw,  George  Bernard,  12, 
42,  102,  no,  127,  130. 

Sherard,    Robert   H.,  84,  87, 

97- 

Sickert,  Walter,  15,  41, 123. 
Silkouettes,  49,  51. 
Silverpotnts,  81,  83. 
Sime,  S.  H  ,  36,  118, 119,  121. 
Sketch,  The,  14,  120. 
Small    Boy    and   the    Barley 

Sugar,  The,  117. 


144 


INDEX 


Smith :  A  Tragic  Farce,  126. 
Smithers,  Leonard,  24,  25,  41, 

82,  83,  87,  89,  120,  125. 
Sophocles,  56. 
Sphinx,  The,  79,  86,  135. 
Spirit    of   Caricature,     The, 

122. 

Spirit  Lamp,  The,  36,  64. 

Spiritual  Adventures,  52. 

Stenbock,  Eric  Count,  64. 

Stevenson,  Robert  Louis,  55, 
62. 

Stories  of  Strange  Women,  72. 

Street,  G.  S. ,  8,  64,  102. 

Strike  atArlingford,  The,  127. 

Struggle  for  Life,  The,  71. 

Studies  inTwo  Literatures,  49. 

Studies  of  Death,  64. 

Studio,  The,  17,  22,  36. 

Success,  65. 

Sudermann,  Hermann,  128. 

Symbolist  Movement  in  Litera- 
ture, The,  49,  53. 

Symonds,  John  Addington, 
52,  53,  101. 

Symons,  Arthur,  6,  8,  12,  14, 
18,  37,  40-43,  46-54,  63, 
79-81,  87,  95,  101,  107,  115, 
122,  135. 

Synge,  J.  M.,  127. 

Tales  of  Mean  Streets,  69. 
Tamburlaine,  16. 
Testament,  93. 
Theatre  d'Art,  4. 
Thirty  Bob  a  Week,  93. 
Thomas,  Brandon,  14,  126. 
Thompson,  Francis,  79,  82. 
Thousand  and    One    Nights, 

The,  32. 

Three  Musicians,  The,  29,  42. 
Times,  The,  39. 
To-Day,  36. 
Todhunter,   Dr.  John,  21,  80, 

127. 

Toilet  of  Helen,  The,  33. 
Toilet  of  Sabina,  The,  33. 


Tolstoy,  Leo,  131. 

To   the    Cafi  aux    Phares  a'e 

I' Quest,      Quartier     Monl- 

parnasse,   98. 

Tournament  of  Love,  The,  99. 
Traill,  H.  D.,  68. 
Trevor  Perkins,  77. 
Trilby,  58. 

Tristan  and  Isolde,  45. 
Turn  of  the  Wheel,  The,  77. 
Turquet-Milnes,  G.,  34. 
Twenty    Years  in  Paris,  87, 

97- 

Under  the  Hill,  14,  31,  42,  59. 
Unwin,  T.  Fisher,  22. 

VALE  PRESS,  123. 
Verisimilitudes,  64. 
Verlaine,  Paul,  43,  44,  46,  50, 

81,  84,  131,  136. 
Vignettes,  76,  101. 
Vinci,  Leonardo  da,  134. 
Virgil,  28. 
Vizetelly  &  Co. ,  57. 

WAGNER,  Richard,  14. 
Wagnerites,  The,  19. 
Watson,  William,  82,  105. 
Watteau,   Jean   Antoine,   17, 

52. 

Watts,  George  Frederick,  16. 
Way  of  the  World,  The,  16. 
Wedmore,  Frederick,  42,  43, 

62,  63,  67. 

Westminster  Gazette,  The,  39. 
When  Greek  meets  Greek,  71. 
Whibley,  Charles,  102. 
Whistler,  James  McNeill,    3, 

5,  7,  25,  40,  60,  101,  113. 
Whistler,  Mrs.  James  McNeill, 

17- 

White  Maize,  The,  73. 

Whiteing,  Richard,  58. 

Wilde,  Oscar,  i,  3,  5,  6,  9,  10, 
12,  14,  19,  22,  24,  25,  32, 
34,57,  60,  61,  79-82,  84,  86, 


145 


INDEX 


Wilde,  Oscar — continued. 

89,101,  in,  114,  120,  121, 

125-129, 131,  135. 
Wilkins,  W.  H.,  69. 
Willy,  59. 

Wilson,  Edgar,  36,  119,  136. 
Wilson,  Edgar,  and  his  Work, 

119. 

Woman  and  her  Son,  A,  94. 
Woman  in  White,  The,  44. 
Woman  Who  Did,  The,  132. 
Women's  Tragedies,  64. 
Wonderful  Mission   of  Earl 

Lavender,    The,  93,  94. 
Work  of  Mr.  Pater,  The,  106. 
Works,  The,  in,  112. 
Wratislaw,  Theodore,  44,  82, 

123,  126,  135. 


Wreckage,  69,  72. 
Wycherley,  William,  16. 

YEATS,  W.  B.,  8,  10,  n,  42, 

43,  45,  80,  82,  120. 
Yellow  Book,    The,  6,  n,  12, 

21,     24,     36-41,     46,     91,    94, 
III,    114,    117,    132,    133. 

Yellow  Book  Group,  The,  9. 
'  Yellow  Dwarf,  The,'  40. 
Yet  Again,  112. 
Yew-  Trees  and  Peacocks,  73. 

ZANG\yiLL,  Israel,  69. 
Zola,  Emile,  57,  131. 
Zuleika  Dobson,  in. 


London,  Strangevays,  Printers. 


WT08  1985 


UC  SOUTHERN  REGIONAL  LIBRARY  FACtUTf 


A    000  571  116    3 


